[ 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”