Saturday, July 22, 2023

Open Source => $ ?

Generating income from open source

What does work:
  • Commercial licenses
  • Charging for more features
  • Hosted version
  • Charging for maintenance and advanced materials
  • Support packages

RedHat Enterprise Linux: "no open source?", Oracle, SUSE

Open Source business models are tricky at best. 
After spending $34B on RedHat, IBM is now concerned in making enough money for this investment.
Solution: require subscription to provide access to RHEL source.

So other companies, like Oracle, are leveraging RHEL for their own Linux distros: Oracle Linux.
Solution: "fork" RHEL, and pay to maintain it, instead of paying license to IBM.

Now so long ago Oracle did similar with Java and court fights for its license,
to protect its $7 purchase of Sun Microsystems. 

This also resembles AWS fork OpenSearch from ElasticSeach, again license issue.

Or MongoDB changing open source license and business model, to stay in big business.

Big money, big mess.

Oracle, SUSE Tussle with Red Hat over the Business of Open Source - The New Stack

SUSE Preserves Choice in Enterprise Linux by Forking RHEL with a $10+ Million Investment | SUSE

Keep Linux Open and Free—We Can’t Afford Not To @Oracle