Last week, I wrote about the somewhat-vague definition of the open core business model, and how it compared to the dual-license business model. Open core, like dual licenses, are all part of the whole "ways-to-make-money-faster-with-open-source-software" genre of business, but they are not the same thing.

Gaming shares many roots with open source, and many games coders would see themselves in a similar light to free software coders – as creative hackers exploring the cutting edge of computing. A game may not have any useful function other than the game itself, but computers are only as good as the last game you played.

Which is to say an open source business model that will generate marginal revenue improvement for firms that employ it, at the cost of developer goodwill and participation. And, potentially, distribution. What open core is not is a model that will mitigate the commercial limitations of the model sufficiently to produce outsized returns similar to historical software producers.

" The idea of open source is that allowing users to change and redistribute the software will make it more powerful and reliable. But this is not guaranteed. Developers of proprietary software are not necessarily incompetent. Sometimes they produce a program which is powerful and reliable, even though it does not respect the users’ freedom.

A couple of days ago, Simon Phipps from Sun Microsystems said that the company ”screwed up“ when it comes to open source. Dana Blankenhorn opines that Sun is still screwing up. Here is the core of his argument.

Everyone seems to have an opinion on the open core debate, and a popular opinion seems to inflict some sort of excommunication to anyone having a less than pure open source monetization process. Therefore I thought that I would add some unsolicited input to this matter.

I've been criticized — quite a bit this week, but before that too — for using the term “Open Core” as a shortcut for the phrase “proprietary relicensing that harms software freedom”.

Apologists for the lock-in-prone "open core" model try to wrap themselves in the open source flag. Your business could suffer.

Game Editor is the open source game design software that gives you the power to create the games of your dreams, and, unlike other game creation tools, gives you the chance to get and change the source code of the game creator and design and develop 2D games for personal computers as well as mobile devices.