OStatic

One of the big debates going on in December among the open source cognoscenti is whether fee-based models are going to start to proliferate. This post contends that 2009 will see a lot more business models built around formerly free software, and this post? points to support among CTOs for charging for open source software. I tend to agree that we'll see more of this, but charging for what was formerly free has to be handled deftly. Here are some important points about monetization models.

From my perspective, one of the best developments in technology during 2008 was the proliferation of new portability options for useful software applications. This was driven by the push toward cloud computing, netbooks (which typically don't store a lot of local resources but do a good job of reaching out to online applications), the availability of low-cost, high-capacity USB thumb drives, and more. We've written about the new version 3.0 of the open source OpenOffice suite of productivity applications, which has been available for a while. If you'd like to be able to use these applications without necessarily having them loaded on your portable computer wherever you are, here are two good options.