I’m starting this blog-post with a quote from the ‘about’ text from the website Saxonica.
Saxonica is the company created by Michael Kay, developer of the Saxon product, to bring the technology to the commercial market. The company was created to ensure continued investment in moving the Saxon technology forwards, and remove the risk associated with using open-source software that has no support infrastructure. Over the six years Saxonica has been operating, this strategy has proved successful in providing quality products and services to both the commercial and open source user communities.
Why am I quoting this website.
Well because it confirmes my feelings that there should be a company wanting to generate money from – hopefully – their own open source projects.
This because, as this text says: “The company was created to ensure continued investment in moving the Saxon technology forwards, and remove the risk associated with using open-source software that has no support infrastructure. ”
Saxonica, who is responsible for XSLT and other XML technologies, undertakes the development of the Saxon XSLT, XQuery, and XML Schema processors. These are now available in Enterprise Editions, Professional Editions and Home Editions – the latter is free though with restrictions, while the others costs to use.
You could say that Saxonica is not the only one using the business model. Zend, the company that developed the Zend Engine to the PHP Scripting Language, also produces commercial products related to PHP. Examples are Zend Studio (which is based on Eclipse) and the Zend Server.
Because of the commercial business plan Zend is interested in developing PHP and show professional and enterprise usage of PHP.
These business models are described in detail in this report from SAP Research: http://dirkriehle.com/publications/2009-2/the-commercial-open-source-business-model/
My gut feeling is that the Saxonica and other similar Commercial Open Source Business Model is the right path, and I think that more and more OSS providers/organizations/… should follow.
