Open Source Business Models and Implications

The GPL doesn’t actually care what enterprise companies do with the code internally, even if they make changes, distribution only counts if it happens outside of their immediate company. There are four major business models built around open source software: Support Sellers (e.g. give away the recipe, open a restaurant), Loss Leader (e.g. give it away to speed up or help out your prop project), Widget Frosting (e.g. sell the hardware, give away the software), and Accesorizing (e.g. sell books, t-shirts, penguin dolls, etc.).

Who: The Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation

What: Chapter 12, Section 1 of the book Copyleft and the GNU General Public License: A Comprehensive Tutorial and Guide and an article on the OSI’s website titled Open Source Case for Business.

Where: available for free on RIT’s Business and Legal issues in FOSS course website and on the OSI’s website respectively.

When: The OSI article was last update in 2014, but is probably much older (Netscape anyone?). First version of the FSF book was released in 2003, but has had consistent updates from then until the latest change in 2014.

Good

• Glad to see the FSF encouraging the distribution of software in a corporate environment (even with modifications!).

• Feeding yourself with open source contributions.

Bad

• Netscape shouldn’t be used as an example of what to do anymore, it didn’t work out in the end.

• A bunch of these links are 404’ing, which leads to kind of a bigger question in web archival: since link rot is such a real and pervasive problem is linking an uncontrolled, brittle source a good form of attribution?

• The whole OSI article is just a load of [citation needed]s, I love Open Source as much as anyone, but some of these items are just ridiculous.

Questions

• Does the Chapter 12 section 1 imply that one does not need to supply the source to the users if it is in a corporate environment? If so why is that considered a different form of distribution than say a download link on a website?

• See question above in Bad item 2.