Essay About Enterprise Environments And Open Source Software

Open Source Business Models – Phd Executive Summary
The Open Source Software (OSS) has born based in a concept for sharing ideas and
cooperation (during the end of 70s and 80s), to build software components that could
be helpful to software developers and, as a consequence, to end-users. This principle
didn’t any premises on “money-making”, it was purely based on building a
cooperative and collaborative model able to develop a wider knowledge base within
the several working software developer’s communities.
With the growth of this cooperation, the software started to be deployed in the endusers
environments, namely started to exist in the enterprise environments. The first
set of packages of OSS software deployed on production environments was mainly
infra-structure software, like Operating Systems and Networking components. At this
stage, the first step towards professionalization began (beginning of 90s), because
enterprise customers wanted to have support for that software, due to the criticality of
production environments. Because of this kind of “insurance need”, the first
generation of Enterprise Open Source Software companies started to appear, being
RedHat Inc. the major successful case until today, keeping its business model focused
to enterprise customers and based on the supporting service of a core product (RH
Enterprise Linux operating system).
The speculation, at the end of the 90s and beginning of the 21st century, about the
growth of Open Source was astonishing, with major investments being made by
venture capitals and business angels, but there was a very important issue that
compromised that speculative growth: the OSS was on the bottom stack of the
software, meaning it didn’t give additional added value or market differentiation to
Enterprise customers, besides reducing some operational costs on the infra-structure
software. The rump-up for the OSS delayed to appear and the business models for the
OSS started to be questioned.
In the mid of the first decade of this century, a second generation of OSS companies
started