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. "