Matt Asay, a member of the Alfresco team, has posted some revealing data about JBoss’s growth over the last five years:
As Asay notes, JBoss’ growth is pretty impressive for any company, never mind Open Source. (The red numbers on the bottom represent revenue growth.) And this happened with their developers spending 50% of their time writing software that is given away for free. The revenues come from the consulting using the other 50% of their time. Keep in mind, too, that JBoss is not a huge company. They’re a bit smaller (measured by annual revenues) than Blackboard, though their revenue growth has far exceeded Blackboard’s. This is great data to share with any stakeholders in your institution who think that Open Source is not a viable business model.
(By the way, if you haven’t looked at Matt’s company’s product, the Alfresco content management system, you should. It’s very strong and the roadmap is even stronger. I expect it to be the best CMS on the market in a number of important categories by the end of this year.)