In a recent post on open source business models, Fabrizio Copabianco from Funambol states his belief that a business model based solely on support won't work.

I can't believe a pure model based on support is going to scale to the one billion dollars we always talk about. A pure support and services model works for a while, then customers get comfortable with what they have and pull the plug on it. Your best customers leave you because they are too satisfied… It is sad but inevitable. Maybe you can make it with an operating system, but if you move up the stack you are screwed…

I believe the issue with open source support models is because of the way they have worked up till now …which is often too much money for too little value.  In the end, companies are willing to pay if the cost is commensurate to the value they get and is better than alternative options (eg self support or community support).  Because open source support is often significantly cheaper than proprietary license plus maintenance costs, it may be easy at first to overlook the fact that we still need to ensure that the value customers get justifies the cost.

More than once at OpenLogic we have been called by companies who had already dropped support from a commercial open source vendor because they value/cost relationship was not there.  They later ran into support issues that they needed help with.  Inevitably, when we help solve those problems, they are happy to sign up for a support subscription.  The customer was always very willing to pay for support – just not the price that the vendor wanted to charge.

 As commercial open source vendors, we need to deliver value commensurate with our cost.  Sounds obvious, but I think it's been easy to skate by on the fact that open source is cheaper than proprietary software.  I don't think that will be the case for much longer.  As the economy tightens, as customers get more familiar with open source, as the competitive landscape emerges, successful open source support companies will be the ones that deliver a lot of value at a low cost.