OStatic

Maybe it's not a completely counterintuitive concept that giving away a service can yield new business relationships and profits, but undoubtedly, actually doing so is still a leap of faith. It was a chance that Open-Xchange felt was worth taking when it announced it would be giving away its webmail module to qualifying telecom, non-profit, and educational organizations. Almost three months later, Open-Xchange is seeing that giving a little bit can bring good returns.

Open-Xchange's ongoing Webmail4Free promotion offers a free (in speech and cost) webmail module in exchange for marketing the company's open source groupware and mobility modules to the qualifying organization's users and signing a support agreement. The agreement terms vary depending on the organization's size and scope.

It's working out for Open-Xchange, which is reporting a rosier Q1 than expected, and has seen a number of new partnerships and customers thanks to the promotion.

Ben Kepes at Cloud Ave. offers some interesting analysis of a question Yuuguu CEO Anish Kapoor recently tackled on his company's blog: Has software as a service (SaaS) killed open source as a business model?

The question raised, of course, is why these concepts are at odds at all -- why are they mutually exclusive? They aren't, per se (SaaS companies can -- and do -- offer their code under open licenses), but Kapoor imagines that for some companies, SaaS takes a bit of the shine from open source. Kepes counters that while this might be the case, SaaS has a fair bit to gain from the open source model.

Last week, Net Applications reported Microsoft's operating system share had fallen below the 90 percent mark on the 40,000 or so websites where it gathers its traffic statistics. InternetNews is reporting that Net Applications made another interesting, if puzzling, discovery.

It seems the statistics gathered from Google.com (this only includes Google employees -- not the public using the search engine) were showing that a third of these users were accessing sites with an unknown operating system. It's more interesting when you consider that proxy servers block all identifying information, but the Google.com unknown systems only had the operating system information obscured.

Theories abound, of course, as to what Google might have up its sleeve. There's the Google is bringing Android to the PC school of thought, and the networking application infrastructure development theory.