Building a Business on Open Source Software

For many years, free and open source software was exclusively associated with the research community, in contrast to the closed source products developed by commercial software vendors. Over the past decade, there has been a vast increase in the availability of open source software, growing from such projects as Linux and Apache. Open source software is being widely adopted in industry, which has led to numerous business opportunities for entrepreneurs and vendors. This activity is having a disruptive effect on the software industry that has affected even the largest software vendors. This paper describes the emergence of open source business, the growing commercialization of open source, and some business models that can be used to build a successful business based on open source software.