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The Phusion guys tried doing it and have had a really hard time making it work. And these are guys who have essentially turned the Rails world upside down with

• nir 18y ago
  It did work out ok for MySQL and JBoss, though ;) Phusion offers a focused product - you install it, usually very easily, and you're done. It's hard to see a simple way to monetize it other than charge money for the product itself (thereby harming its market share). They might be able to sell support contracts or professional services, though. On the other hand, if you're selling a service, seems to me you could benefit, or at least not lose anything, by opening your source. Would Twitter be doing worse if their software was open? They might actually have had better code by now, since so many coders use their product. Also, you might build your product on top of an OSS codebase, using the accumulated code and domain knowledge as foundation. AFAIK that this is what Boxee is doing with XBMR. Also consider Wordpress - being open source helped it become a leading platform, later facilitating wordpress.com which has a pretty decent business model.
• tptacek 18y ago
  It seems more likely to me that they're having a hard time making it work because there isn't a lot of money to be made in the market they've chosen. Accelerated X11 was also not a great proposition. JBoss made it work because they were a pin-compatible replacement for something IBM was already charging a fortune for to large enterprises. But Phusion sells to the cool kids, not the suits, and the cool kids shop at thrift stores.