profits from open source

Filed in archive Entrepreneurship on February 25, 2004

Wired highlights how to reap profits from open source citing MySQL.

"To make money, MySQL adopted what Urlocker calls a dual-license model. Under this scheme, users can get the product for free if they agree to abide by a standard open-source license and make changes to the software available to other developers.

Customers who don't want to share their code can buy a commercial license for about $500 per database server. This price, McKendrick notes, compares with a cost of several thousand dollars per server that companies typically pay the major commercial vendors.

Currently, the company has about 4,000 paying customers, who brought in more than $10 million in sales in 2003. "