How to leverage an Open Source Project commercially?

Question

Assuming you have been involved in an open source project (GPL'ed) that has been around for as long as 5-10 years, during this time it has been fairly successful - despite a good handful of commercial/proprietary alternatives.

Now, you've come to realize that the long term contributors would like to leverage the project commercially, possibly even in order to make a living or start a company based on it. So that they can exclusively work on it, without depending on other, unrelated, work.

So, what are some of the viable and recommended steps to turn an open source/GPL project into a commercial "success" (in the sense of self-sufficiency), so that long term contributors may preferably be paid to work on the project, without affecting the open source nature of the project itself?

In other words, what are generally some of the more common revenue-creating mechanisms for open source software, and how can these be successfully introduced/implemented - also, what prerequisites/conditions apply?

Answer 1

I saw a company a few years back that took a handful of OSS spam and virus filters, built a web interface to administer them all at once, put it on a 1U server, and sold it as a network security appliance.

It was a nice product for mid sized companies that wanted a single solution for all spam and virus filtering, that auto-updated itself and was easy to administer.

Technically they were just selling the server, and the web admin tool, all the OSS components were freely available, if you wanted to spend the time setting them all up individually.

Answer 2

I think the main issue is the business model adopted by the project owners and the ones who want to turn it into revenue. It will depen on what kind of project is it, such as end-user product or as software API. In the case of end-user projects, Software as a Service seems a very good choice as a business model.

Look out for examples, and case studies on successful projects, such as apache, firefox, sugarCRM...

Focusing on specific niches is also a very important thing.

Answer 3

You should think in terms of the "product halo," which refers to all of the related items and services surrounding a product that are not the product itself. For example, MySQL is open source and freely downloadable, but its product halo could include services like installation, customization, consulting, training, etc. Or Zend contributes heavily to PHP and offers Zend framework, but they also have a number of commercial products surrounding those offerings. Active State creates the Komodo IDE and has an open source version and then a commercial version that extends the open source version. Or take Linux...or any other number of examples. A book that you might find interesting on the topic is Wikinomics.