Based on my experience with XAware, the impact of an open source model on distribution is far greater than even the numbers quoted above would indicate. XAware converted to an open source model with the launch of its XAware Release 5 in early November, 2007. In less than two months, which included the holiday season, the number of web site visits has been more than 3x the number from all of the prior year, nearly 100,000 visits in less than two months since announcing on November 6. The number of downloads of the software in the two months since announcing the open source model, approaching ten thousand, exceeds the number of prior users and trials accumulated over the company’s more than five year history. XAware is already seeing the expected benefits of wide distribution and use, with new users of the open source beginning to document use cases, make feature requests and identify bugs - which will drive up software quality and rate of innovation and adoption. The company is also experiencing inbound inquires about paid support services, availability of commercial license options and enterprise runtime management software made available separately under a commercial license model. We can now speak from direct experience that open source is a powerful and disruptive model for software that brings economic benefits for users and for providers. Bill Miller, XAware.org

Thanks for the insight Bill

[...] This just in from Matthew Aslett. A true must read if your business has anything to do with Open Source, as it clearly show how Open Source strategies can be a powerful marketing tool. Case in point: a unnamed company switching to an Open Source distribution model, with mind-boggling numbers about their first year of operations (emphasis mine): In its first year using an open source distribution model the company saw: [...]

Great stuff, Matthew, thanks for this. I found these numbers a bit scary to some extent, as they seem to show a somewhat poor performance of Open Source when it comes to generating invoices. Other than that, I can definitely witness the impressive lead generation capability of Open Source (though I would quite refrain from using the word “qualified”), as well as the sheer amount of resources required to perform conversion. I just wish Commercial Open Source had a better value proposition. I played a bit more with your numbers on my blog, and it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Would love to hear your feedback!

[...] Can LoopFuse crack the open source conversion conundrum? (451 CAOS Theory) [...]

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Sorry, LoopFuse is NOT an OSS vendor in any real sense.

I’d be grateful if you could amend that article: LoopFuse OS code was released as v1.0 under GPL, mainly - it seems - to get some publicity (which it did). Since then no changes or updates have been released to the OS code, and others can’t contribute, whilst the hosted app (that you refer to as the commercial offering) is at v3.9.

Yes, there is (early) OS code for LoopFuse, but description of LoopFuse as any form of actual OSS company in this way is disingenuous at best.