The obvious question that any open source "business" needs to address is how to get people to pay for offerings. Being that the code is out there and customers can theoretically support themselves and/or never pay there needs to be a compelling reason for them to give you their money. Open source companies typically sell subscription support and services and layer value into the subscription through a variety of The obvious question that any open source “business” needs to address is how to get people to pay for offerings. Being that the code is out there and customers can theoretically support themselves and/or never pay there needs to be a compelling reason for them to give you their money. Open source companies typically sell subscription support and services and layer value into the subscription through a variety of mechanisms.In relation to subscription sales, I wonder if “artificial scarcity” (as Luis cites) is the tipping point for people to pay or rather there is a delta between self-support and where a customer realizes the fact that they are flying unassisted and decide to subscribe. If I worked for Gartner I would call it the “Cliff of Unsupportability.”Every open source company struggles to figure out what these “value triggers” are. As Matt notes, things like “immediate bug fixes, 24/7/365 support infrastructure, a service to educate customers on best practices, enhanced documentation etc.” are all legitimate parts of the offerings. The hard part is figuring out what is the key sticking point for the individual company. Some people are concerned with IP, others with response time, and others with tools. What’s interesting is that several companies (MySQL for example) have proven that a high-quality support offering is enough to get people to subscribe and there is room to grow the relationship with additional tools, offerings etc. This is something we’ve seen at MuleSource also but early on we decided to provide management tools as part of our subscription. We provide the tool as a “value trigger” against our proprietary competition and include it in the subscription while the competition charges nearly as much for tools as they do for the software itself (and don’t forget you need support contracts for all of the above.) Someone really needs to create a matrix of all the commercial OSS companies and their value triggers…Savio, I know you love a good chart! Open Source