March 31st, 2005
Open source bundling
Open source bundling is the new trend. Martin Lamonica’s story yesterday about SourceLabs describes one such bundles.
Most are aimed at businesses. Many, like the SourceLabs bundle, are AMP Stacks, with the Apache Web Server, MySQL database, and PHP scripting tools.
The idea is for a company to give away a collection of open source applications, then offer to support the lot and wait for the money to roll in.
Bundling has a long history in software. Perhaps the most successful bundle of all time is Microsoft Office. By selling a collection of office tools together, for one price, Microsoft knocked Lotus 1-2-3 off the board.
The question is whether that will work in open source. So let me ask this of our enterprise customer readers.
Have you gotten an open source bundle? Would you throw out tools that work in order to take one, if it came with support? What tools would you like to see in a bundle? Let us know in TalkBack.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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