Commercial Open Source Software

Open Source Business Models: Sun and the Open Source Funnel Marketing

Simon Phipps is openly discussing his vision about the Sun Model, an high level overview of how Sun and other open source vendors deploy (open source veni vidi vici, in my own words).

Yesterday Simon focused on the third phase, making specific examples of delivering value for real users that are heading towards scale, as well as specific hardware systems for MySQL and storage appliances. As a matter of fact Sun is moving towards a more and more open source oriented business, but I believe that also the first and the second phases could be profitably turned into sources of revenues as well.

What is in your marketing funnel? by massdistraction

Open Source Funnel Marketing.

An ordinary open source marketing funnel is really wide at the top – think about the many millions of downloads. Prospects enter the funnel, sometimes deploy by themselves, sometimes they simply don’t, but only few continue down to the bottom. What happens in the middle?

MySQL Webinars might stay free, but you might consider to sell their transcriptions, maybe including manuals or other infoproducts. Community of software deployers’s outputs, like the Italian OpenOffice.org FAQ, could also be repackaged and sold to customers. Sun might well create infoproducts out of everything, the limit is the sky.

Free software and other materials help to create relationships, then you can start to sell them your prospects low-priced products and services,  eventually bringing them to become repetitive customers who will buy subscriptions.

Open Source Network Marketing will soon follow.

Technorati Tags: commercial open source, open source business, open source marketing, funnel marketing, business models, Sun, SimonPhipps