Making Money with Open-Source Business Initiatives

Abstract

Open-source software (OSS) is software that can be used freely in the public domain but is often copyrighted by the original authors under an open-source license such as the GNU General Public License (GPL). Given its free nature, one might believe that OSS is inherently inferior to proprietary software, yet this often is not the case. Many OSS applications are superior or on par with their proprietary competitors (e.g., MySQL, Apache Server, Linux, and Star Office). OSS is a potentially disruptive technology (Christensen, 1997) because it is often cheaper, more reliable, simpler, and more convenient than proprietary software.