There’s a lot of people convinced that Open Source is huge. That it’s disruptive. That it’s the future. But there are also a lot of people struggling with business plans that try to make Open Source their centerpiece.
About a year ago, CIO magazine published a matrix of Open-Source Business Models. That article classified strategies as follows:
Open Source + Service Maybe this is the classic Open Source business strategy. Give away the software and then sell support and services around the software.
Mixed Create an Open Source software base and community but also sell proprietary add-ons.
Open Source + Buy Off Offer software as Open Source but with the restriction that if you redistributed something that has been modified, you’ll need to pay for a proprietary license.
Open Source + Aggregation Package stacks of interoperable Open Source software. Test and support the interoperability of the OS components.
Open Source + Hardware Hardware companies offer Open Source software that runs on their machines. But to use the software, you need to first buy the hardware.
Recently a new wrinkle on these set of Business Models has emerged by a partnership that was announced between Red Hat and Exadel. Exadel’s model relative to Open Source has been primarily as an aggregator, similar to what SpikeSource, Navica, and SourceLabs are doing.
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But Exadel has also created commercial Eclipse-based developer tools like RichFaces, Ajax4jsf, and Studio Pro. In the partnership with Red Hat, these products will take on an Open Source license and join the Red Hat umbrella of products. Going forward they will be called JBoss Rich Faces, JBoss Ajax4jsf and Red Hat Developer Studio.
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There is no company merger or acquisition. The partnership grows the Red Hat line of products and complements other Red Hat products. Exadel has licensed all the software to Red Hat and Red Hat retails all rights for new development, although it is expected that Exadel would continue to be a major contributor to the development.
Red Hat and JBoss have much higher name recognition than Exadel and it’s expected that software under the Red Hat banner would be much better positioned for acceptance.
The agreement will free up Exadel to devote more time to other activities. Much of their main business is coming now from building and supporting high-traffic sites for large companies, like mortgage.com. At least in the short term, Exadel would also receive work from Red Hat to assist in the support of the transferred software.
