Commercialize Open Source Software

In the prolearn project meeting, the Europeans demonstrate their effort in e-learning domain. Many choose to make their research results open source. Open source is of growing interest to the education and training sectors for a number of reasons: Low cost solutions for effective learning provision; loose “community” of educational institutes; benefits from collaboration. I am impressed by the number of the high quality software provided by this community.

Though for research work, it can end up at the open source software, I want to see the opportunities to commercialize open source. Globus, an open source implementation of OGSA (Open Grid Service Architecture) is under commercialization by Platform, a Toronto based company. I think there are two ways to commercialize open source software (OSS): providing linkers to existing products or providing commercial support of the open source.

Don Rosenberg of Stromian Technologies (http://www.stromian.com) writes a monthly column for businesses. Many interesting points:

. Government funded projects and academic projects are the source for OSS.
. The future of software industry is the service, may the software is free.