Many people ask me how people make money out of Open Source (especially in the enterprise software space). I often give the example of Sun Microsytems who are now a company who base nearly all of their business on Open Source (a big change for them from a few years back. Sun invest a huge amount in open source software (OpenOffice.org, MySQL etc) and have a business model based on support and services. In the video below Simon Phipps from Sun Microsystes does an excellent job of explaining the model and also the advantages of businesses using open source software
Now only time will tell how succesful Sun will be in future and of course it helps that they have a healthy back account generated from previous non-open source operations but the same could be said for Microsoft.
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