OStatic

Red Hat, along with the City University of New York and Intel, announced yesterday that they are creating the New York City Open Source Solutions Lab. This lab, which will be headquartered at CUNY's Institute for Software Design and Development in Manhattan, is aimed at helping local and state government agencies in New York take advantage of open-source solutions. The lab will provide governments with the ability to develop and test a variety of open-source technologies running on Intel chips.

Last week, Microsoft announced Equipt, a subscription service for Microsoft Office and related products. The product, which will cost $70/year and be sold at Circuit City stores, will provide the user with one year of updated anti-virus and spyware programs, Microsoft Office, and access to the Live workspace product for sharing documents. Equipt is not an open-source package. Rather, this is a way to keep the revenue coming from Microsoft Office. But Microsoft's new pricing strategy both vindicates and challenges business strategies employed by open-source companies.

Red Hat acquired Amentra last week. What does this say about open-source software, and the business models of the companies that are trying to capitalize on it?

One of the biggest questions that people often have about open-source software is, If I don't pay for this, then how do the developers make money? The standard answer to this question is that the developers can make money from consulting services. That is, the author of an open-source package can release the program for free, and then charge people to maintain and extend it.