[Design] [Cosmo][Prop] Business Models for Cosmo

[Priscilla Chung]

Katie and I were discussing the long term strategy for Cosmo–specifically how to make Cosmo a self sustaining project. We drew up some ideas which have been discussed about before. I began to research and document some of the ideas and created a spreadsheet to list out the pros and cons of each business model. Please review the attached document for more details. I've also created a wiki page: http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/NotesCosmoBusinessModelComparison

Here is a brief description of the different business models:

1. 'On-demand' organizations would pay a monthly fee for all of their members and receive a unique sub-domain, ie. http://yourcompany.osaf.us 2. Maintenance and support services for customer deploys. Customer would deploy on their site or would pay OSAF to deploy and maintain an installation. 3. Single user subscription: users pay a monthly or yearly fee for an allocation of space or calendars on a centrally hosted site. 4. Ad-based hosting: accounts are free, hosted on a central server and paid for by advertising.

Additional thoughts?
-Priscilla

I'm interested in starting a discussion and proposing the 'On demand' model. To me it seems to make the most sense for OSAF in the short term. Think of it as one check for 20 customers opposed to individual billing for each customer. The big drawback for #2 is that it may tie up R&D for maintaining older releases that are in production. There's also nothing that says any of these models cannot be combined together.

businessModelComp.xls
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