sustainable business models

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Heartbleed, an Apache License Business Model Failure?

The two year old HeartBleed bug that was recently discovered in OpenSSL and that affects millions of internet users, reveals a similar problem that could have a serious impact on the way we look at open source software. Companies such as Cisco have built expensive applications on top of OpenSSL. Security consultants have been paid good money to guarantee that OpenSSL was safe. But the OpenSSL project itself was driven by a core of only four unpaid volunteers. The German engineer Robin Seggelmann is now taking the blame for the error. His code was verified by Dr. Stephen Henson who overlooked the bug. It would be unfair to blame these two individuals for the problems caused by Heartbleed. They made two mistakes. The second mistake was a minor error in their code. Although this error took huge proportions, they should be forgiven for that error. Their first mistake was their choice to make their code available under the Apache Software License. That mistake is more problematic.

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Hybrid Open Source Software Development & Business Models

Starting in the early 2000s, a number of companies began to release a portion of their product's source code to the open source community, while keeping key parts closed. This allowed them to make claims that their company and products were open source. These products were termed commercial open source or hybrid open source software, to distinguish them from true free and open source software (FOSS). In hybrid open source business models, some of the software products are released using a business-friendly open source license, but some of the special source code add-ons are only available for a fee. There currently appear to be two major forms of the hybrid open source business model...

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What Open-Access Publishing Actually Costs

Ellen Wexler | The Chronicles of Higher Education | November 9, 2015

Advocates for open-access journals say that academic research should be free for everyone to read. But even those proponents acknowledge that publishing costs money — the disagreement is over the amount. The issue was highlighted last month, when all six editors and all 31 editorial-board members resigned from Lingua, a prominent linguistics journal, after a disagreement with the journal’s publisher, Elsevier, over how much libraries and authors should pay. ...

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