The economic impact of open source models is going to be very high, not only in the software industry, but in society in general. In this section, we discuss in some detail some of the more foreseeable issues related to this impact. Some of them are just projections from current trends, but some others have already arrived. To begin with, several new economic models for open source projects will be presented (externally funded, internally funded, unfunded, and internally used). Later on, the issue of total cost of ownership will be discussed in subsection 5.5. In subsection 5.6 some discussion on the macro-economic consequences of widespread use of open source will be introduced. To finish this section, some impressions on the future of the software market, considering open source models, are discussed in subsection 5.7.
The subsections on new economic models are important because many traditional models of the software industry are heavily based on proprietary software where the income is directly related to per-copy price (particularly in the case of shrink-wrapped software). With some exceptions, these traditional models are not viable with open source software, since income cannot come from selling copies of the software (freedom of redistribution tends to set the price at the point where marginal cost of reproduction is near zero). Therefore, open source business must look for other sources of income.
The taxonomy of models presented in this section is not just an
analysis of currently existing models, even considering that some of
them have been already tested in the industry. On
the contrary, we have tried to create as complete as
possible a categorization of models that can be self-sustaining, or at least
feasible from a business point of view. However, real
examples are added to each categories wherever we know of them.
Interested readers can refer to [7]
for another taxonomy of open source business models, more focused on
what is currently available, and
to [8], which includes the results
of a survey about how do open source business behave. In addition, in
appendix B we provide information about
some real business based on free software, which can be used as case
examples.
