Seattle WA, USA
Nicolas Pujol helped grow a $10m software startup (MySQL) into a $1 billion acquisition, making it at the time the second largest open source company. He is an investor, advisor to start-ups and author of The Mind Share Market: The Power of an Alternative Currency where he demonstrates the impact of hybrid economies. Pujol enjoys promoting open societies and ways for capitalism to generate shared value through open source and productive marketing.
Authored Comments
Chris: there are 2 ways to monetize open source.
1/ You target the same general user group (different sub-groups for free vs. paid) with a <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1718663" target="_blank">freemium </a>model. Most OSS projects faced reflexivity in their early years & those that addressed it succeeded. The best test: look at a project. Do you see them having to hurt their commercial opportunities by making a feature or service free? Do they hurt their community by introducing a commercial offering? If so, they have a reflexivity challenge to minimize. RHEL/Fedora is much better than pre-Fedora, for example.
2/ Another model is called a "<a href="http://www.slideshare.net/nicolaspujol/multi-sided-platformsmsp" target="_blank">two-sided platform</a>", where you completely deflect the reflexivity problem. Unlike freemium you deal with two different groups of customers (e.g. ad funded models, SaaS using OSS as core technology). Look how WordPress.com has been able to grow its user base... inherently non-reflexive.