Thursday 4 January 2007

Opensource Business-Model Guru?

I'm really interested in some of the hybrid business models being pursued in the US, where code is licensed under both something like the GPL, and also on a commercial licence in parallel for those that need it. It seems to me that there's a challenging line to draw between being too commercial to be accepted and to build a community, and between limiting your upside by going down the support model. However, in the UK Open-Source businesses do not (as far as I can find) succeed in raising Venture Capital, unlike the US (I'd be delighted to be shown how ignorant I am on that!) I've been trying, without luck so far, to track down someone in the UK who really understands these models as it's applicable to a number of our current and potential invstees- please let me know if you know anyone.