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2008 East
DIAMOND SPONSOR:
Data Direct
Frontiers in Data Access: The Coming Wave in Data Services
PLATINUM SPONSORS:
Red Hat
The Opening of Virtualization
Intel
Virtualization – Path to Predictive Enterprise
Green Hills
IT Security in a Hostile World
JBoss / freedom oss
Practical SOA Approach
GOLD SPONSORS:
Software AG
The Art & Science of SOA: How Governance Enables Adoption
PlateSpin
Effective Planning for Virtual Infrastructure Growth
Fujitsu
Automated Business Process Discovery & Virtualization Service
Ceedo
Workspace Virtualization
Click For 2007 West
Event Webcasts

2008 East
PLATINUM SPONSORS:
Appcelerator
Think Fast: Accelerate AJAX Development with Appcelerator
GOLD SPONSORS:
DreamFace Interactive
The Ultimate Framework for Creating Personalized Web 2.0 Mashups
ICEsoft
AJAX and Social Computing for the Enterprise
Kaazing
Enterprise Comet: Real–Time, Real–Time, or Real–Time Web 2.0?
Nexaweb
Now Playing: Desktop Apps in the Browser!
Sun
jMaki as an AJAX Mashup Framework
POWER PANELS:
The Business Value
of RIAs
What Lies Beyond AJAX?
KEYNOTES:
Douglas Crockford
Can We Fix the Web?
Anthony Franco
2008: The Year of the RIA
Click For 2007 Event Webcasts
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Open Source Is No "Get-Rich-Quick Scheme" But If You Get It Right...
...you can be as relaxed as Marten Mickos. Money is being made with Open Source, for example with Cloud Computing

Money is being made with Open Source. Some make spectacular money by exploiting Open Source (Google, Apple) and some things wouldn't even exist without it (Internet, Software as a Service, Cloud Computing) - so it really boils down to finding the right business model.

BusinessWeek has a good one on making money and growing fast in the open source world, titled "Open Source: An Open Question for Red Hat and Others". The general theme is: Open Source companies have a tough time growing fast and making profits - with RedHat and Novell as examples - altough "Software supplier Red Hat is racking up growth figures that much of techdom might envy. Sales rose 32%, to $157 million, in the quarter ended May 31, and profits climbed a respectable 7%.".

What's wrong with that? The critique goes to the business models: As the new RedHat CEO (coming from Delta Airlines) puts it: "A pure service business is not particularly defensible," says Whitehurst. "Some open-source companies have not truly figured that out."

How true is that. But money is being made with Open Source. Some make spectacular money by exploiting Open Source (Google, Apple) and some things wouldn't even exist without it (Internet, Software as a Service, Cloud Computing) - so it really boils down to finding the right business model.

Open-Xchange decided 2 1/2 years ago to add the indirect Software-as-a-Service business model. Since then we have won the worlds largest hoster (1&1) and many other premier hosters as our partners, adding 8 million Open-Xchange users this year.

It took us 10 years to get there, so Marten is probably right: "Open source is not a get-rich-quick scheme," says Marten Mickos, the former CEO of MySQL and now a senior vice-president at Sun. "You have to have patience." He adds that the company was 13 years old when it sold.

But if you get it right you can be as relaxed as Marten these days.

 

About Rafael Laguna de la Vera
Rafael Laguna de la Vera, the co-founder of Open-Xchange Inc. and chairman of the board, took over responsibility as CEO in January 2008. In 2001, he initiated the technology partnership between Open-Xchange's development team and SUSE Linux - today a Novell business. The result of this partnership, SUSE Linux Openexchange Server, became the best-selling Linux-based groupware solution. Rafael acts as board member for asknet AG and comparis.ch.

LATEST ECLIPSE STORIES . . .
Micro Focus has announced the availability of Micro Focus COBOL for Eclipse, encompassing versions of Micro Focus' Net Express and Server Express solutions designed specifically for the Eclipse open source ecosystem. Micro Focus COBOL for Eclipse provides an integrated development en...
Only if you were on the dark side of the moon could you have missed the impact of the iPhone. Its sweeping success has brought mobile services into the mainstream. As the first device to convincingly integrate traditional phone capabilities with Web access, it highlights the multi-chan...
Much like “Web 2.0″, cloud computing was a collection of related concepts that people recognized, but didn’t really have a good descriptor for, a definition in search of a term, you could say. When Google CEO Eric Schmidt used it in 2006 to describe their own stuff and then Amaz...
It’s time to wrap up the year 2008 - a year of change with Obama, the Olympic Games and the financial crisis. It was also the year when Yahoo said no to Microsoft. 2009 will be all about Cloud Computing: the technological hype has started already but the commercial breakthrough will ...
Genuitec has announced the production release of MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench 7.0. The new release, built upon Eclipse 3.4.1/Ganymede, delivers a comprehensive environment for AJAX and Web Services in the Eclipse space. In addition, MyEclipse 7.0 is delivered on top of the Pulse Ecli...
There's a new release of OpenSolaris out – OpenSolaris 2008.11 – out a whole three weeks before the end of 2008. There was a 2008.05 release, aka Project Indiana, in May but that wasn’t as commercial or production-oriented as this one. Both run only on x86 machines, not Sun's own...
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