Interesting you bring this up at this time. The Santa Fe Complex is
working with Joyent (for dedicated hosting on OpenSolaris) and
Virtualmin (for an ease-of-use administration webapp) for our web
presence.
All of the software we are using is open source -- and additional
software not in Virtualmin's 78 open source installation scripts is on
a huge package repository (Blastwave and CoolStack), again open and
free. And Joyent is making its site-specific groupware open source.
So both companies are making their living on open source and are
contributing to the open source community. And both are absolutely
unique and invaluable.
How do they make money?
Virtualmin is doing interesting split development: a GPL basic system,
and a for-pay advanced system (with the 78 additional install
scripts). There is some "Tom Sawer-ism": folks build plugins for them
of packages they want to administer via the Virtualmin "console".
Joyent is based on a synergistic set of Solaris, Apache, MySQL, PHP
(LAMP w/ the L replaced with S :) .. and are open sourcing their
Connector software. They also have a sneaker: most Linux based
hosting uses VMWare, not open sourced or free, to run their shared
accounts. Joyent instead saves that cost by using Solaris Zones
directly.
Both companies have a huge community, which serves to answer each
other's questions, vastly reducing their support costs. They also
work together as partners, giving each other support and new customers.
Cool!
-- Owen
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