Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money - NYTimes.com

From an open source market dynamics reality check

"“We talk about doing good and doing well,” said Dries Buytaert, the creator of Drupal, an open source content management system for websites, and chief technology officer of Acquia. The company gives away the Drupal code and sells things, like site search or ways to run the code in Amazon Web Services, that people pay for.

“All the open source companies have learned that this is what you have to do,” he said.

Which raises the question of whether it makes sense to build free stuff at all."

Open Source and the Challenge of Making Money - NYTimes.com