InfoWorld: Open source software merits debated

InfoWorld: Open source software merits debated "At MySQL, the company’s dual licensing model allows for users to get the database free if they are not deploying it in a commercial application, noted Zack Urlocker, vice president of marketing at MySQL. Customers who will be using the database in a commercial environment and do not want to publish any additions they make to the source code to pay for a license, he said.
“We actually make our money very [similarly] to a traditional company,” with 65 percent of revenues coming from license fees, Urlocker said. Customers pay for licenses and support like a traditional software model, he said.
“We’re not a religion, we’re not a cult, we’re not a charity. We’re a business,” Urlocker said. MySQL experiences 35,000 downloads of its software daily, but only has 5,000 paying customers, according to Urlocker.
Urlocker stressed that the software market has in fact changed. “The old model, which many of us lived through in the enterprise software industry, is high prices for software that doesn’t really work and that’s really not acceptable anymore,” said Urlocker.
Microsoft's Fitzgerald said users will no longer accept the high failure rates that have historically predominated software projects. “That model is never, never coming back,” he said."