Providing Commercial Open Source Software: Lessons Learned

摘要

Even though companies like Sun, IBM, MySQL and others have released several commercial Open Source Software (OSS) products, little evidence exist of how to successfully launch such products and establish a living community around them. This paper presents a case study from a small software company succeeding at establishing a business model and a vivid community around their own OSS products. Based on this case study, the paper presents lessons learned which could help other OSS providers.