It can be notoriously difficult to make money from open source. But is it more difficult than making money with anything else?
That’s going to be the subject of my talk at SEE 2009 (for your diary: Oct 28th at 1:00-1:45pm) and I’m really looking forward to sharing some monetising insights with you – from experience!
I’ll be talking about ways of driving revenue that are not so obvious and not so talked and written about so please join me. I’m Steffano Maffulli and I am Community Manager at Funambol.
On the 28th I’ll be illustrating the most popular dual-licensing and services models of open source companies, and discuss their applicability to other projects. I’ll also discuss how Software as a Service (SaaS) is both a major opportunity for commercial open source projects as well as a challenge.
The talk shares the experience of how Funambol, a popular mobile open source project, has adapted its business model over time to uniquely make money from mobile service providers, while not attempting to monetize its developers or users, yet still gaining significant value from its community. The talk will be of interest to anyone trying to figure out a successful business model for mobile open source.
