The Beekeeper

There is much media coverage and water-cooler talk about open source software and professional open source companies but these companies and their business models are so new that most people do not have direct personal experience of them and consequently many people have numerous misconceptions about how they work. In almost all cases I think people underestimate not only the potential of the professional open source business model but also how much it differs from the proprietary/commercial software business model and how much it affects the roles and functions within the organization. Pentaho was founded in 2004 to provide Business Intelligence (BI) under a professional open source business model. After spending the last few years immersed in professional open source I am sharing my thoughts about the workings of this business model. There are numerous business models around professional open source software (POSS). The model described here applies to those companies that operate with a model where the company is the main source code contributor. This model is used by companies such as Pentaho, MySQL, Alfresco, JBoss, Digium, Zimbra etc.

The link address is: http://wiki.pentaho.org/display/BEEKEEPER/The+Beekeeper