Free software is a billion dollar industry with proven business models, writes eWEEK columnist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. Dual-licensing, support, and other models can all work, if the right model is chosen and implemented wisely.

According to Vaughan-Nichols, dual-licensing works well for best-of-breed products such as MySQL, OpenOffice, and Qt, because people are willing to pay for a commercial version. The support model works for Red Hat, which has revenues approaching a quarter billion — and year-over-year revenue increases of 40 percent — since dropping box software sales in favor of a support model. Another quasi open source model — retaining control of intellectual property — helps companies like Sun get their software into users hands and reap some of the benefits of open source.

Vaughan-Nichols concludes, “if you want to profit from open source, you need to be more business-savvy than you would in other businesses. But if you one of these models and make it fly, you can certainly make your living, your first million, heck, maybe even your first billion, from free software.”

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