Open Core is an emerging business model that may complement the general SaaS business model and it’s something we’re watching closely at Snapfix. SaaS (Software as a Service) models can use OSS as the basis for providing a web service. It can also include platform and infrastructure (PaaS, IaaS).

Open Core refers to Mixed Source or Dual License OSS Business Models. The ‘Open Core’ represents the OSS portion of the whole product. See my earlier post on software licensing here Value Capture

Support also includes consultancy activities.

There is an ever growing list of companies offering Commercial OSS that are valued over 100M USD. These include:

• Drupal
• Alfresco
• Wordpress
• Hadoop
• Elastic Search
• Intellij
• MongoDB
• MySql
• Linux Kernel

and many others. Joseph Jacks of Open Source Capital provides some great resources and a definitive list of COSS companies values over 100M USD.