Creators are the first choice, I agree. But open source is different, and we see system integrators all around the word appropriating returns from commons, as small open source vendors unable to fulfill customers’ needs worldwide.

@Simon: I really enjoyed your second post, check out also my second one.

@Richard: great example, really! I think that engineering is just part of the “whole solution product”: tutorials, methodologies or knowledge bases need (just) human editorial efforts, and they can be even the result of collaborative projects!

I think you’ve got exactly the right idea with “other opportunities”. Any business model hoping to leverage something thats free - open source or otherwise - has to use the adoption garnered by “free” to sell something else. Anything else. There’s lots of possibilities. The challenge is to find enough revenue in all those something elses to justify the engineering necessary to build something that is good enough so that people will use it, zero price notwithstanding. Here’s another example of how to sell something else, that leverages broad adoption - again from Sun: http://tinyurl.com/5hprbu - really no different than selling screen real-estate on your browser window based on ubiquitous search engines.

But I will

>Dispersed knowledge…
Selling documentation is a tough business…

I think implementing software is always a ‘business’…but customers tend to pick the creator of the software to implement the software.