[jononor]

The best commercial case for Open Source is as part of a commoditize-your-complements strategy, in my opinion. Give away the open source part in order to increase demand for your proprietary offerings. Use the open source project to build brand recognition, trust, active community, etc. But earn the money on something complimentary.

Examples: - Agency / software house, sells consulting, makes open source libraries in their niche. - Hardware/product vendor, sells devices, open software on the device. - SaaS vendor for IoT, sells say managed database service, gives away reference software/hardware designs for IoT devices.

This concept is easy in principle, but requires there to be two things which have very strong synergy, and one needs to execute well in both.

[halz]

This echos of Google's strategy with Chromium.