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Piracy becomes a concern with this model. The one that makes the most sense, that I've seen, is pretty much what Sun is doing right now. Give the (foundation

• jerome_etienne 17y ago
  It is easy to pirate in both cases (all paid, or part free/part paid). Nevertheless in practice, companies dislikes to pirate, especialy for a prize tag as low as 20$ (for current example). It is even more obvious in this case as it is to build web applications, all those applications will have the same 280north look. So trivial to identify any piracy. selling support is nice but very hard to scale.
  • nrr 17y ago
    Well, granted, piracy's going to happen nonetheless, and it's still going to be a niggling issue no matter how you look at it. Two ways to curtail it: give the foundation parts away for free and charge what people are willing to pay for the rest. Support's easy as sin to scale. Certification programs are a good way to accomplish this; they establish a trust chain and also provide yet another revenue stream to take advantage of. Maybe your customers would rather purchase a support contract through one of your Certified Professionals® instead for one reason or another. A good use case would be because your customers feel most comfortable dealing with someone who can speak French, but you only provide support in English and German.