A business model for open source, part2

In my earlier post, "A business model for open source?", I mentioned Sun Microsystems in particular because they recently opened an open-source office, and that made them a topical example. I could have chosen other companies as examples, particularly IBM.

However, it was remiss of me not to comment on Sun's recent decision to open-source its Solaris flavour of Unix. My comment was that large companies open-source items that do not impact their core revenues. I don't believe Solaris revenues ever rivalled Sun's hardware revenues, but it has been a tidy earner for Sun for many years now. However, Solaris is really the last of the Unix variants that has held out against Linux, so the writing was on the wall. Solaris as a direct revenue earner didn't have a future. Solaris as a support earner still has a future, and Sun didn't miss the obvious, that you don't get Linux support contracts for free. There may have been commercial pressure on the pricing of Solaris, but there is no such pressure on Solaris support contracts.

More interesting is the recent suggestion that OpenSolaris could overtake Linux as the open-source operating system of choice. That's a big call, especially as I cannot imagine IBM nor HP promoting Solaris over Red Hat or SUSE Linux. That said, for production systems in larger companies, I can see OpenSolaris often being preferred to any Linux distribution; Solaris is simply a more mature variant of Unix that has a long track record in production environments.

If OpenSolaris does beat out Linux in some areas, though, I can't help thinking that it will be another example of an open-source release that is able to beat out its competition because the company behind it has a strong revenue stream from something other than the software itself. Good or bad? I still really don't know.