July 1, 2010
"In short, open core is a model where a company produces a product that is mostly available as open source, but then there are some closed source components around the open source “core”. The point of the model is that it is supposedly easier to sell closed source than open source."

From Open core is not open source.

I agree that the open core model makes you produce more close source software, because the open core it’s based in selling closed source software and not open source.

Henrik Hingo uses Red Hat and Canonical as a good examples of open source based companies that are doing it well, but I’m not that sure.

The open core advocates say that selling closed source it’s good, because that allows them to make more open source software. It makes sense, to some extent, and we’ve seen Canonical use the same argument to support some unpopular decisions (even the closed source of their Ubuntu One services).

You know, because a company needs to make money to hire developers to work on open source. It’s scary, isn’t it?

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