Introduction

There are many different business models associated with FLOSS. Some of them are described below.

Consider how they might relate to education.

A search via Google using terms like 'business model' 'open source' etc came up with one or two useful sources for discussion ...

As a background 'culture' for this sort of provision I thought that The Long Tail was a good start ... the idea that (in retail terms) there will always be someone who will buy what you are offering if you wait long enough ... you just have to make it available and wait for them to come to you. This idea was first used by Chris Anderson in Wired - October 2004 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail#The_Long_Tail_by_Chris_Anderson and is used to underpin the business model of several web-based operations (e.g. Amazon).

Contribution model

The Model where access to resources is granted on the basis of your own contribution (karma points?) - a paper that discusses this idea is Kuznetsov, S. (2006) Motivations of contributors to Wikipedia. ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society 36(2): Article No. 1.

Something else that I found in my Google search was a paper that said:

In this paper, we consider a very simple and common approach to funding the production of public goods such as advertisement-free radio and television stations and impromptu music performances in public places. The artist offers to continue producing their freely-available creations so long as they keep getting enough money in donations to make it worth their while to do so. We discuss social, financial, and technical arrangements that can make this approach work fairly well, though we don't believe it will ever provide a complete solution to the problem of paying creators for their creations. We primarily discuss the way a specific instantiation of this idea, called the "Street Performer Protocol," might work.

The paper is The Street Performer Protocol and Digital Copyrights by John Kelsey and Bruce Schneieravailable and is available at: http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_6/kelsey/index.html.

Everything is free. Costs are paid for by donations. (See the Street Performer Protocol above)

Another paper turned up by Google was Seven open source business strategies for competitive advantage by John Koenig (2004) http://www.itmanagersjournal.com/articles/314 ... which briefly discusses 7 open source strategies including the The Patronage Strategy ... roughly speaking, if you make something freely available AND enough people take use it - it then becomes the de-facto standard around which you sell things.

And finally, another discussion paper, not this time turned up as a result of a Google search but as part of a email from the HUMANIST Discussion Group http://www.princeton.edu/humanist/, is the fairly brief The Deep Niche by Michael Jensen http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0010.206 which suggests a new economic model for electronic publishers based on the long tail but also, I think, with interesting implications for the philanthropic ethic of Open Source endeavours.

Education by open source?

I think that this paper could fit into this discussion ... Educational models and open source: resisting the proprietary university by Brenton Faber (listed on Google Scholar at: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cluster=9764863442367713421) neatly outlines various educational/pedagogic models based on 8 insights into open source development listed by Eric Raymond in his The Cathedral and the Bazaar document (available loadsaplaces: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cluster=6010379552678850266. For example, there's number 2: Working from Texts, Working through Drafts where the idea is to get students joining into ongoing projects and 'taking up the reins' so to speak, carrying on where others have started and learn to integrate into a project team.

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Introduction

Contribution model

Sponsor/donation model

Education by open source?