Business Panel

You Can't Make Money In Open Source!

The headline event of OSCOM 2 in Berkeley was the introduction of WYSIWYG XML editors from Bitflux and Xopus. But Xopus will not attend OSCOM 3, saying they need to make a proprietary version of their WYSIWYG editor so they can make some money.

This month the founder of PHP-Nuke, with tens of thousands of installations one of the most popular news portals, announced he would withdraw the code from open source. Within a few days the huge user base appears to have forced Francisco Bruzi to reverse his decision.

The greatest example of a famous open source project is the Red Hat distribution of GNU/Linux and a number of related GPL'd products. Red Hat raised $500 million in their dot-com bubble IPO, but have been chalking up 7-figure losses for years since. Until now, when Red Hat has their first significant profitable quarter.

Gregor Rothfuss and Paul Everitt wrote a powerful piece on getting CMS projects to work together, and Tony Byrne has an insightful reaction.

What's going on? This panel will look at the successes and failures of open source, and will draw out lessons for today's open source CMS developers. What are the key indicators for a successful business model for open source?

Or is an open-source product always a "loss leader" to attract customers to other proprietary products, expensive customizations, support revenue, etc.

Moderator: Charles Nesson
Panelists:
Ed Boyajian VP, Red Hat
Ed Kelly, Ropes and Gray
Gregor Rothfuss (Wyona)
JT Smith CEO, Plain Black (WebGUI)