Stephen O'Grady, analyst over at RedMonk, has a good posting on how open source companies are coming up with new revenue streams based on automated services. As Stephen points out, we've gone from "How can you make money from open source?" to "How do you make more money?" With companies like Red Hat, MySQL and others, the first question has largely been answered. But there are many ways to skin a cat, so it's wo Stephen O’Grady, analyst over at RedMonk, has a good posting on how open source companies are coming up with new revenue streams based on automated services. As Stephen points out, we’ve gone from “How can you make money from open source?” to “How do you make more money?” With companies like Red Hat, MySQL and others, the first question has largely been answered. But there are many ways to skin a cat, so it’s worth considering what additional ways open source companies can make money.Stephen gives examples of value-added services including Red Hat Network, Red Hat Exchange, MySQL Monitoring service, Ubuntu Landscape. These go beyond the traditional support model to provide additional insights through automated rules and/or collective knowledge. I think this is an area of opportunity for many open source companies. Can you tap into the collective experience of users to provide best practices? Can you provide management facilities that make open source more accessible and easier? Can you automate the tuning and maintenance of complex systems to minimize the labor costs associated with using your software? In my view, these are all good areas to investigate. Disclosure: I bought Stephen a beer at Oscon… 😉 Open Source