Does anyone know if the model of open-source with a consulting/premium support company behind it works? I've paid 10gen for MongoDB assistance before, so I know there has to be some legitimacy behind the model. And, you know, MySQL.
Most of the 'successful' open source companies are not just straight up service outfits. Redhat, for instance, has a model where you must buy a subscription, or you don't get support. In fact, you can't even use Redhat if you don't buy a subscription. They do this with some trademark trickery, which creates some of the artificial scarcity that open source software lacks.
Somewhere, somehow, something has to be 'scarce' to be able to sell it: http://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity
People's time, is of course scarce, but services can be difficult to scale, as doing so requires people/management skills much more than actual technical expertise, or some kind of product. Also: to be profitable, a services company should spend as much time as possible billing for services, which may come into conflict with time spent on things like building a product that is then given away.
The Redhat model establishes a brand, often the original source for the product / project and uses that to market their expertise. Redhat is primarily a support and consulting organization. If you want to run an SAP system on Redhat, for it to be certified (and hence supported, which anyone buying an SAP contract will want) it has to be on Redhat Enterprise Linux with the support contract that goes along with that. In this case support can easily go all the way up to e.g. patching the kernel / glibc / whatever, and Redhat can charge a premium for offering that kind of in-house expertise.
The MySQL / Qt model is a mixed proprietary / open source model. They offered their libraries under the GPL (instead of the LGPL, BSD or other more permissive licenses) meaning that if you wanted to be able to distribute their libraries as part of a proprietary application, you had to pay for a license.
Since nginx is BSD licensed, I assume they are going for the prior.
The LGPL option was only added in 2009. Prior to that, various licencing mechanisms were used to extract revenue on various platforms.
(Eg, at one point the *nix version was GPL'ed but the Windows one wasn't, so you needed to pay to ship it on Windows)
* Percona: MySQL
* Canonical: Ubuntu
* Best Practical: RT
* Concurrent: Cascading
* Basho: Riak
In a way open source is perfectly socialist: There is almost perfect shared ownership of the production means (the software itself is free, the means to create new software - your brain and a computer that can run Linux - is well within the reach of anyone just moderately motivated.).
On the other hand, it's perfectly capitalist, libertarian and free market: You alone own what you produce (provided you alone created it). No-one can tell you what to do (unless you let them) and it's hard to imagine a field where it is easier to become your own boss. Competition is fierce, creative destruction rules, the entire field surges ahead at a blinding pace.
Saying that they only do support (discarding all of their engineering work and contributuions) is not accurate.
Will it work for webservers? Probably. Usually companies that use webservers are supposed to have capable webmasters, but once a company becomes large enough the biggest motivation of its executives becomes to cover their asses, and at that point they will probably start paying for support.
Unfortunately, this model will probably not work for our software because we are trying to make it a zero configuration zero support product. The paid support/free software model is a bit of a perverse incentive as it rewards products that are more difficult to use and configure.
If you think about it, the only products that are typically supported via contract seem to be extremely sophisticated, large, or cornerstone products. Making such products OneTouch-EZ is likely a waste of everyone's time and resources, because you have to hamstring the product and spend a ton of development effort making it idiot-proof, when you could have just been making it better instead.
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