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 s

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.