I'm not sure that there is much of a difference in an "open source" startup vs. any other type of startup venture. The same market forces apply. In the case o

I'm not sure that there is much of a difference in an "open source" startup vs. any other type of startup venture. The same market forces apply. In the case of MySQL and JBoss, they have a free (beer and speech) offering that met a huge need in the developer community, which got them their necessary ubiquity. Once they had market share, they could start charging for services and other things (didn't JBoss charge at one point for documentation?, I forget) Redhat is interesting in that in my opinion, they just showed the power of business development. Customers like their software to be "guaranteed to work on X", and software vendors like to keep X to a small number to reduce testing cycles. If you look around at large software vendors that "certify" their product on Linux, it's almost always on Redhat enterprise linux. This is a business relationship, not a technical one. Redhat builds a rigorous release process and helps companies certify, sure, but anybody could do that. They had the vision to build relationships where they could pay off. I'd argue that Github is an open source startup. They use, advocate, host and inspire the open source community across every language and platform. They also happen to be very successful. Tom's recent post on "Optimize for Happiness" is a fantastic read, and would be something I'd read over and over again if I were to start up a company anytime soon: http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/10/18/optimize-for-happiness.html http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/10/18/optimize-for-happin...