Neo-proprietary tactic considered harmful for Open Source as a brand

[ Thanks to Benoit des Ligneris for this link. ]

"The Freemium model is a marketing model used by lots of service based companies. The principle is to offer a product "for free" supporting it with or without advertising and offer value-added services to "premium" customer that pay a fee. Very popular amongst startups and recent technology companies : skype, linkedin, rememberthemilk, etc.

"At some point, one could even argue that the most successful open source company (RedHat) is very closed to this model : they offer a great product for free (the RedHat Linux Distribution) and monetize services of only a small percent of their users.

"Fauxpensource has several definitions and even if this is not yet a widely used term. Some synonims are open-core or neo-proprietary. Neo-proprietary is the term I will use in this post as there is no common sounds or part with Open Source.

"Somehow, what happens when you marry the two concepts together ? Well, that's somehow the subject of this post"

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