Case study about three companies
Companies with open source business strategy take use of open source products and either gain their profit by providing the software and side services or using it as a part of their business. Using this strategy reduces research and development costs while the open source community does a lot of work that the company can use. The company wins from using open source products and the community whereas the clients profit from the cooperation between open source product and the service provider. This kind of companies have strong belief into open source communities.
Acquia is a company providing its clients with technical support and site monitoring for sites built upon open source platform Drupal. Acquia is not building the sites but helps to get started with Drupal. Drupal is an open source content management platform that allows its users to easily manage all sorts of web sites including community sites, e-commerce applications, blogs, personal sites and many more. Acquia uses Drupal in its business and needs it to be excellent, so they also give back to Drupal through fixing bugs, implementing missing features and writing documentation. Acquia works with the community of Drupal to solve variety of problems and therefore does not need to have all the resources inside the company.
Red Hat is the best known company using open source as its main business strategy. With being a strong competitor for proprietary software providers Red Hat has gained lots of critique but also fought aggressively against software patenting. Red Hat is world's leading open source and Linux provider. Its Open Source strategy provides customers with plan for building infrastructures that are based on open source technologies with focus on security and ease of management.
Another company using free software and commecial know-how is Canonical - the commercial sponsor for Ubuntu. Its mission lies in realising the potential of free software and supporting it through high quality professional services, input to its further development and community. Canonical offers full scale of commercial services to help businesses benefit from Ubuntu and Free Software. Among all services there is custom engineering, support, training and certification.
All above-mentioned companies use open source products for their business, they also carry the mission to support and develop open source software and contribute to the communities. On the same time they make profit, help other businesses profit from their services and also work for the ongoing innovation and free development of software as they find patenting slowing down the process.
No comments:
Post a Comment