Besides economical considerations, I believe that another factor is the need for customization. When a customer need its own flavor of a commercial Linux distribution, whatever is the reason, it is time to consider to go on its foot. Flexibility matters. Right?

I think CIOs would disagree with the statement that support is of much less value than a product. Without some form of support most CIOs will not be willing to deploy a piece of software. And CIOs are willing to pay for quite a bit of piece of mind which is what support buys. We heard that loud and clear from CIOs interviewed at last year’s Think Tank.

I suspected it and I was just waiting for customers feedback like the ones you reported. What about the size of those enterprises?

But, just because CIOs are willing to pay for support, doesn’t mean they are willing to pay for it only from the developer of the open source solution itself.

Appropriating returns from the commons is not an easy task, but it is also true that well established open source firms likeRed Red Hat don’t seem too worried by copy cat versions. Yet another complex and interesting issue here, am I right?

[..] a business with a high services revenue component traditionally doesn’t scale to meet the required returns for most investors, and in order to be successful today, growing a large and competent channel is critical. How much of the services is a vendor going to keep and how much are they going to give to their channel to motivate them?

Well, I definitely agree with you Andrew, the channel is critical and few open source firms found their way, here Open Source Franchising I am sure can play an important role. Do you agree?