[roymurdock]

Good case study on one successful open source project. Shouldn't be used to draw any broader conclusions about impact of open source on any company's biz model. Some portions of typical software stacks are amenable to open source biz models (such as general purpose server OS), while many others are not.

Note that the study does not actually measure ROI from a revenue perspective, but estimates based on theoretical saved costs: The company invested $1M in open source infrastructure and potentially saved $2M in direct development costs (given that the code base is current worth $3M). [1]

Most interesting takeaway for me is the implications of open source for government funded projects, and a ratification of the idea that contributions of code for some public tool can save the general public tax money. A forward thinking org could try to broker some sort of tax cut based on SLOC contributed to public, government-sponsored projects? Maybe that already exists.

Would suggest studying Red Hat's rise to $2B in yearly revenue to understand how a company takes open source and turns it into revenue.

[1] GFDRR’s direct and in-kind investment in GeoNode over the past six and a half years has been in the range of $1.0–$1.5 million USD...GFDRR’s investment in GeoNode would be a reasonable amount even viewed strictly as a software development cost: the GeoNode software today represents an approximately 200% return on investment in terms of code written, since the current GeoNode project would most likely have cost $2.0–3.0 million USD if GFDRR had produced it alone as proprietary software, without building an open source community around the codebase.

[bsears]

I'm currently working on trying to replicate the success Wordpress has seen in monetizing open-source, It's my belief that the key to creating a viable open-source product revolves around creating a platform people can host themselves and make it open to plugin development. I don't see much value in the smaller projects most people work on because those rely on licensing for revenue.

[killjoywashere]

Red Hat powers a bunch of USG supercomputer systems, I suspect their revenue without that would be difficult to sustain.