The future of commercial open source software lies in commercial licensing strategies, but which are the strategies that are more likely to deliver the results vendors are looking for?

Much of the open source blog chatter over the Christmas period was related to open source business models/strategies, largely triggered by a post written by Dave Rosenberg in which he declared that commercial licensing, and specifically open core licensing will be all the rage in 2009:

“Typically we now see an “open core” freely available with “exclusive” or proprietary features only available when you pay. If you are trying to build a commercial business on top of an open source project, this is likely the right answer.”

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I wrote yesterday that Christensen’s law of Conservation of Attractive Profits could be used to explain why open source vendors are increasingly turning to hybrid development and licensing strategies to generate revenue from open source.

Before I could think about doing so Arjen Lentz wrote a comment that did a lot of the explaining for me.

To recap, “The Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits”, articulated by Clayton Christensen in his book The Innovator’s Solution, states:

“When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value chain because a product becomes modular and commoditized, the …