Optimal Pricing Strategies for Open Source Support Providers

The market for commercial open source software (OSS) has been rapidly growing with the proliferation of OSS. One way to commercialize OSS is the support model, which has been adopted by leading OSS firms such as Red Hat and JBoss. Despite the growing interest in OSS commercialization, little research has provided OSS support providers with a pricing guideline. In this paper, we examine the optimal pricing strategies for OSS support providers. Our benchmark is a monopoly case in which we investigate a startup software vendor's incentive to choose the OSS support regime over the proprietary one. Then we extend the model to a duopoly case in which OSS under the support regime competes against proprietary software. We characterize the conditions under which the OSS support model is viable under competition. We believe that our results offer insights to the OSS vendors who consider commercializing their OSS with a support model.