This week theme has been "who's going to pay for open source?" It's shown up in a number of blogs, like Matt Asay's. In several blog posts he's said things like "Who will pay for open source in the future?" and "Someone has to pay for this stuff, and it's not going to be governments." Roberto Galoppini's post quotes Larry Augustine saying that customers need to be educated on the value of open source.

I'm sorry, it's just not the simple. The open source software development model is not a business model.

I've spent many years talking about the business of open source. The question has never been "who's going to pay for it?" Open source is not a business model. The open source model can be part of a company's business model but the open source ecosystem itself is not a business. Open source software is created because an individual or a company sees benefit in it. Although making money can be one of the benefits of open source software, rarely does anybody receive a check to write a piece of open source software, any software, as long as it's open source. They might receive a check to write some software and it might make sense to write that software under an open source license but they didn't get a check just because it's open source.

If companies want to be paid to create open source software, they need to work out a business model that includes creating open source software and providing value that customers are willing to pay for. It's not about educating governments, customers and end users to the fact that they need to pay companies to develop open source software. It's about figuring out why it's beneficial to a company to license their software under an open source license. 

I believe the model is self sustaining and self correcting much like free markets are. OpenLogic provides open source software and services to companies that need it. Companies are willing to pay OpenLogic because they need a number to call for 24×7 support. Now OpenLogic doesn't write most of the open source software they support, so OpenLogic in turn pays open source software developers to help them resolve issues. If not, the developers would just say "hey, we wrote that in our free time, why would we help you make money off of it?" (Actually, they probably wouldn't say that. The open source community is extremely generous and helps many people with problems for free on their mailing lists but OpenLogic wants to pass along some of the revenue to help maintain the ecoystem as well as maintain developer goodwill.) OpenLogic also donates to organizations that support open source software.

Have all the business models that include open source software been worked out? Of course not, we're still figuring it out. But so far, there are many business models that can successfuly include open source software. It's just that there's not one single "open source business model".

If open source software is valuable, it will be created, and it will be part of a much larger ecosystem that includes numerous business models. That's already been proven. It's not a question of who will pay for open source software, it's a question of what problems will open source software solve, and how will companies build businesses around those solutions.