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A comment on Ask YC: What are the downsides of open source?. Parent comment

Re:Ask YC: What are the downsides of open source? by staunch on Saturday June 07, 2008 @01:14PM (#211593)
> The frequent cry of "but we'll make money selling support" ignores a critical fact: There aren't enough hours in the day to get rich by selling support contracts.

Speaking of ignoring critical facts:

1) You can hire more people to do support, which increases the total available amount of hours in the day.

2) Most support contracts are barely used and bought purely for comfort, so you can oversubscribe your support team to increase profit margins.

3) Every year software companies make billions on support contracts. MySQL made many millions on support.

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Re:Ask YC: What are the downsides of open source? by davidw on Saturday June 07, 2008 @01:30PM (#211602)
Regarding 1) - yes... that's true, but it's a very linear model, which means it's of less interest to people like VC's. 2) is true, but lots of people realize that they don't need the support. The better you can bundle it, like Redhat does, the better off you are, because it means sticking more people with fees for something they don't need.

It's not an easy road.

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