Blog: Pete Loshin

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New Open Source Business Model using Eclipse

It's starting. The new wave of new businesses, built on new models for making money while using and supporting free/open source software.

Eclipse is "an open source community whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle."

Even with massive improvements since I first wrote about it in The Value of Eclipse for the Open Source Community almost two years ago, Eclipse can still be confusing and complicated to get up and running.

Some see that as an obstacle to an otherwise useful tool, but others, like the people at Genuitec saw an opportunity for a cool service, MyEclipse, a subscription based toolbox for enterprise Eclipse development.

MyEclipse subscriptions start at $31.75/year, but according to this article at eWeek, Eclipse Gains a Pulse, Genuitec next month plans to announce "PoweredByPulse, a free service that company executives said could become the de facto mechanism for provisioning software, whether commercial, free or mixed."

This is most encouraging: it means the long-anticipated model of providing services around open source software is getting real.

If you want to use Eclipse, it's free. You can figure it out on your own, spending your time; or you can purchase access to infrastructures for using and distributing software using Eclipse.

Genuitec is doing the heavy lifting to build the infrastructure, but they're keeping the costs down because the services are automated. So you get the best of both worlds, and if someone comes along and offers a better set of Eclipse-related services, you're free to jump ship.

What a concept: vendors compete based on the value proposition they offer, while not imposing proprietary software with its attendant vendor lock-in. Enterprise software consumers can decide on which vendor based on performance and quality, not whether or not they support some proprietary standards.

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