I've been thinking about open source business models quite a bit over the past year. In my mind, the most successful model is to dual license the source code for a product. You offer your source under a nice viral GPL-like license, and then offer a commercial license for those customers that want to use your product without releasing their source.
The best known examples are Sleepcat Software's Berkeley DB, Ghostview from Artifex, and MySQL from MySQL AB. (The dual license model is discussed in this post.)
This model works well for these companies because all of their products have a huge codebase. Certainly there must be multiple hundred of thousand lines of code, at least. Given that the open source community can use them for free, there is less incentive for someone of the Free Software bent to reimplement their product.
What if the value of a product is an innovative concept? If I invent something really innovative and useful, and try to go the dual license route, then I'm leaving myself open to what I call "reimplementation risk". That is, someone might reimplement it and release the code under a more liberal license, depriving me of any potential income. Of course, I can also be selling support, but that model doesn't seem to have worked very well for LinuxCare, etc.
One solution to the problem of reimplemention risk is to use patents to protect your idea. Then you can offer your source code, and grant your GPL customers a free patent license. Then your commercial users are getting both software, support, and a patent license.
The only person I know that is using this model is Raph Levien. He has lots of patents and licenses them free for GPL use:
All of the patents listed here are subject to the following patent grant:Whereas, Raph Levien (hereinafter "Inventor") has obtained patent protection for related technology (hereinafter "Patented Technology"), Inventor wishes to aid the the GNU free software project in achieving its goals, and Inventor also wishes to increase public awareness of Patented Technology, Inventor hereby grants a fully paid up, nonexclusive, royalty free license to practice the patents listed below ("the Patents") if and only if practiced in conjunction with software distributed under the terms of any version of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111. Inventor reserves all other rights, including without limitation, licensing for software not distributed under the GNU General Public License.
He has patents on halftone algorithms, among others. It is the idea, more than the code that is the value.
To me this is a very nice business model. Does anyone out there (Ok, all 3 of you who read my weblog) know if there are other people using this model? Please let me know.
It is very fashionable to be anti-patent. Of course, many of the charges are true. The US Patent office will let you get a patent on any damn fool thing these days, and they are really best used as legal weapons of big companies. (IBM is charging that SCO violates 4 of their patents. Well, of course they do. IBM has so many patents that every person in this country must violate an IBM patent by getting out of bed. ... but I digress.)
This is one case where patents can be useful to the little guy. It would let you share, without giving it all away. Any comments on this post would be appreciated, as I've been thinking about this idea for quite a while.
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