Open Source Software At A Crossroads
Over the years we’ve seen different approaches to monetizing open source, and we have examples of them all in the past year’s exits:
- Sell support and services (Heptio acquired by VMware VMW -1.98%)
- Sell managed open source ( MongoDB as-a-service)
- Have an open source core, sell the bits around it ( Elastic , Pivotal IPOs)
- Make order out of chaos ( Red Hat RHT -0.16% acquired by IBM IBM -0.09%)
- Aggregate and accelerate other peoples’ code (GitHub acquired by Microsoft)