On Tuesday 10 March 2009 13:01, jtd wrote:
FOSS relies on making widely available ALL tools necessary for creating software. It also understands that debugging, maintaining and customising code is expensive. Further it presumes that most people have moments of creativity and hence harnessing that creativity will build a large pool of ideas. Thus the business model is to leverage everbody's idea and code in return for one's own contribution (miniscule in comparison to others' contributions), parallel the review and debugging process, and charge for distribution, customisation, maintainence and or ride other services made possible by using FOSS.
Commercial Distributions RH, Canonical aka Ubuntu, Novell aka Suse, etc
Customisation KG, JTD, RH,
Maintanence KG, Rony Bill, JTD, RH, Canonical
Services Google, Jabber, Yahoo
Forgot to add Saswata, Mitul and many others on the list.
The names here are indicative of the massive range of business models and sizes.