This week’s Open Source Business Conference was a strange meeting of Enterprise IT users, venture capitalists, and free software entrepreneurs. The opening keynote was delivered by Red Hat’s freshly minted CEO Jim Whitehurst who gave a very modest speech noting that while Red Hat has been a leading open source company they have not necessarily been an open source leader.

In an eWEEK interview, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst says his company is "defining a whole new business model" by applying collaborative principles similar to those behind Facebook and Wikipedia. Whitehurst speaks out on open source business models, RHEL 5.4's KVM hypervisor, and the cloud.

I have noticed a trend developing in the business models of successful open source companies. These companies are implementing a business model that is based on dual licensing their software.

Red Hat's CEO Jim Whitehurst has good reason to be optimistic. In his first full year as CEO of the Linux vendor, Whitehurst, a former Delta Airlines executive, has managed to pilot Red Hat into growth territory despite the overall turbulence in the global economy.

Jim Whitehurst warns against overlooking power of open source model to radically improve business

We hear a lot about this or that open source business model, but rarely does anyone explain in a simple, succinct way exactly how an open source company makes money. In this video, though, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst does exactly that.

I’ve talked in the past about a number of “open source” business models. There’s the MySQL “dual license” model, where all the software is available under an open license but a proprietary license can be purchased.

So what happened to open source as a business? There was a wave of “commercial open source” companies that were going to change the world, including SugarCRM, Alfresco, Jasper, Pentaho, and ActiveGrid, a company I started in 2003 to bring open source software into businesses.

The explanation of why zero pure play open source vendors have hit the one billion dollar revenue mark has never seemed, to me, particularly complicated. The economics of open source are fundamentally differentiated from the closed source models that preceded it.