Selling software that sells itself: An interview with Matt Asay (LinuxWorld) [LWN.net]

Selling software that sells itself: An interview with Matt Asay (LinuxWorld)

Posted Aug 18, 2007 11:28 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
Parent article: Selling software that sells itself: An interview with Matt Asay (LinuxWorld)

You know what?

This is a realy good interview. Probably very insightful. It's nice to have such a profit-driven open source software company. (previously a modified mpl with attribution license.. now fully gplv2)

> But you know what? We have worked with Microsoft on interop without doing any sort of a patent deal; as has Sugar and MySQL and Zend and these other companies. We work directly with Microsoft for a customer of ours to insure SQL Server integration with Alfresco. Didnt have to sign any patent deal with them to get that done. We both had a mutual customer. It was in our mutual interest. We both wanted to make money, therefore we did it. But the patent thing is a complete smoke and mirrors, I dont want to say trick, but it has nothing to do with interoperability. No matter how much Microsoft may repeat that, it has nothing to do with interoperability.

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Selling software that sells itself: An interview with Matt Asay (LinuxWorld)

Posted Aug 18, 2007 11:35 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

I regards to the decision to move from MPL-with-attribution to GPLv2:

> The community felt otherwise and we were uncomfortable with that and so I made the decision to go to the GPLv2, which has been fantastic for the company in all respects. I mean literally, leads went up, page views went up, downloads went up, our registered community went up in significant percentages. Our sales went up 50 percentage. Our average sales price went up 25 percent, meaning the size of the deals went up. Were now getting a thousand, two thousand leads per week. So everything was positive from it. weve made more money, not less. We have more community, not less. More community involvement. (*snip*)

I wonder how other people's experiances compare with this.