Business model

The proposed business model around Open CASCADE is based on the following sources of income:

• Provide specialized components as proprietary software, with a traditional proprietary model.
• Market proprietary components built by third parties.
• Sell services: training, consulting, hot line, etc.

As the reader many notice, this is a mixed business model, where the investment in free software development and maintenance is recovered in part by selling proprietary software based on it or complementing it.

Within the Open CASCADE development plans, third parties have an outstanding importance as partners. Each partner can play different roles, simultaneously or separately, that have to be defined among the following possibilities:

• Generic software provider, able to download the software and disseminate and support it inside their community while adding value and services.
• Components and facilitators provider, able to bring new components to the existing open source library or to the proprietary component gallery
• Application provider, usually supplier of specific applications and often an independent software vendor.
• Generic software user, able to download the software, and to develop its own specific in-house applications.
• Business integrator, in charge of the support and assistance, and providing services for Open CASCADE project implementation.

All of those partners should help to improve the collection of products and services around Open CASCADE, making it more interesting to potential customers.

Of course, not only advantages were perceived. Some risks where also identified due to the decision to go open source. Some (if not all) of them are common to almost any free software project:

• Kill the product if the project fails. Since it is no longer possible to sell licences in a traditional way, there is some risk of never getting enough resources to continue development.

• Misunderstanding from our service customers, specially due to the ignorance of how the open source model works.

• Total loss of control over the project. Since anybody can release improved versions of Open CASCADE, there is some risk that a third party becomes the preferred source of distribution and services for it. Matra Datavision no longer has a monopoly on the product.

• Main competitors possible reactions. Perhaps they are forced to go open source too, which could dismiss the competitive advantage of Open CASCADE being the only free software product in its market niche.

In the following years it will be seen whether the Matra Datavision decision of making CASCADE an open source product was a right one, and whether it fulfills its expectations.