i want to clearify my doubt actually what is the defference between Proffesional and commercial.im a MBA final year student.im pursuing my mba from TamiNadu.Under ANNA UNIVERSITY.

SO PLEASE GUIDE ME.

According to a recent IDC survey, which Matt Asay summarizes for us, less than one percent of all open source components at those users surveyed had attendant services associated with them. Apparently, customers are not buying nearly as much as we were expecting.

In another informal survey discussed on the Rodrigues and Urlocker blog, several CIOs made the point that they may only be willing to pay for open source support services in the first or the first two years, after which they expect to be able to handle the components themselves.

My take is that commercial open source may turn out to be the only viable long-term option!

This is very interesting. I’ve been waiting to see this distinction appearing.

There is a big difference in openness between Commercial Open Source and Professional Open Source (using your definitions):

1/ When the company owns the product and can use a double licence, it has more leverage to get the customers paying than when you don’t own it fully. When you don’t own it you need to run a more open open source licence than GPL in order to allow all customers to make use of the software even in non open-source situations. We at XWiki use LGPL which for me represents a good balance.

2/ When a company is commercial open source is can gradually decide to close more and reduce it’s investement on the community side, so that it can favor the commercial offerings. Now this does not necessarly happen and still allows for a GPL fork (a Community Open Source version).

For me this second point is key. It significantly highers the potential ROI of the business and there are highly significant long term chances to see the software being slowly closed, which will lead to a fork to Community Open Source.

So for me Commercial Open Source is not stable long term. It will end up in a fork between nearly-closed source and Community Open Source.

Professional Open Source is more stable although it also allows for a Community Open Source fork but this will be much less likely than in the Commercial Open Source case. The market will decide wether the initial actor deserves or not to stay dominant.

When I started my open source business, stability was an important thing for me, so I decided for LGPL and Professional Open Source. This is binding for our users/developers that want to contribute or base their work on top of XWiki, but this is also binding for our company.

I think there should be more understanding that being commited on one Open Source strategy is important and a good thing.

I’m very afraid to see double licence businesses turn closed-source or nearly-closed-source.

Some licenses, however, make commercial use harder than others. But pretty much every open source license allows at least for commercial services around the project.

My classification is strictly written from a commercial perspective—how and why open source makes strategic sense as a go-to-market approach for software companies.

I view a classification of free and non-free as independent of my classification. As you say yourself, any of the three commercial classes I mention can be free software or not.

Such free/non-free classification probably has two dimensions itself, along the classic “freedom to” and “freedom from” axes. However, I’m not talking about these.

In general, moral classifications are hard to get a scientific handle on, so you won’t find me addressing them often on this professional blog.

So yes you can get commercial free software (like OutKafe, SugarCRM etc.), community free software (like python, kde etc.) and professional free software (like GNU bash, JBoss etc.).

I think the consideration is critical – and your separation incomplete. The single largest source of free software is the FSF having produced more projects than all the others combined over the past 35 odd years. The FSF is a professional software creation organization – yet it is non-commercial, in fact it’s legally registered as a charity – but your definition would make it commercial (they COULD sell you the software under a EULA – you said nothing about whether there is a snowballs hope in hell that they WOULD).

Then you have companies like mine, which support free software, use the phrase free software and actively promotes… you guessed it… free software. Many of the examples you mention have done the same, or chosen the term FOSS to indicate that they support BOTH the ethical values of free software AND the technical merits of the open source world (I use FOSS within my company, free software when speaking in my personal capacity – I think the logic should be obvious) .

Either way, it’s good that somebody is trying to figure out good definitions for these ideas, but I think the process is far from even coming close to covering the breath of the FOSS worlds development models.