An open source company is a company whose business model is built on a customer acquisition process in which customers first use a free-to-use open source version of the product before being upsold to a commercial offering by the company.

When we talk about commercial open source firms, the word commercial is redundant, because all firms are commercial. It is a left-over from the early days of commercializing open source software when customers needed reassurance to its viability.

This post was triggered by a tweet by @krishnan.