What companies will pay for

[tleeuwenburg]

In my experience, companies are not very interested in paying for software as such, but rather in paying for solutions. This includes maintenance, support and liability. As a result, the open source nature of the underlying software need not be any issue.

Companies like Redhat pursue this strategy at the O/S level, plus the application level, plus the consulting level. This matches the commercial strategy of IBM who have roughly a similar market offering (although they also do hardware).

In my view, what is being paid for is confidence in the solution, rather than for closed vs open source as such. Redhat have invested in their reputation for providing solutions on open source software, and a part of their reputation comes from paying developers to work on open source software.

Perhaps the original question was directed more to how individuals could make money from open source, or how other businesses could reasonably be built which include paid open source developers.

I am not sure how to 'close off' my line of thought, so I won't. Comments welcome.