The Rails Wheels licencing system and Open Source

[Mark James]

Michael Tiemann wrote:

> The Red Hat model is not the only commercially successful model.  The 
> company I founded, Cygnus, was based largely on developing free (GPL) 
> software for $$$.  We built that company to $25M/year in annual revenue 
> before being acquired by Red Hat (who also had approx $25M/year in 
> revenue at the time).  You can read how we made Cygnus work in the 
> O'Reilly book Open Sources.  My chapter is freely downloadable, and 
> gives revenue figures, profits, and a detailed analysis of what worked 
> and what didn't.

I found and read that page yesterday Michael

   http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/tiemans.html

Very interesting and inspiring. I think I need to find another founder.

> The Red Hat model has proved itself to be very scalable ($500M+/year and 
> counting), but we still bid and win GNU development contracts, and 
> funded development is still a part of Red Hat's business.

Without Red Hat and Cygnus, I don't think OSS would have the
respect and spread that it does.

Do you insist that all development work be committed to the
public repository?

Mark