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Open-source software is widely used both as independent applications and as components in non-open-source applications. Many independent software vendors (ISVs), value-added resellers (VARs), and hardware vendors (OEMs or ODMs) use open-source frameworks, modules, and libraries inside their proprietary, for-profit products and services. From the customer's perspective, the ability to use open-source technology under standard commercial terms and support is valuable. Customers are willing to pay for the legal protection (e.g., indemnification from copyright or patent infringement), "commercial-grade QA", and professional support/training/consulting that are typical of commercial software, while also receiving the benefits of fine-grained control and lack of lock-in that come with open source. == Introduction == Unlike proprietary off-the-shelf software, which comes with restrictive copyright licenses, open source software can be given away for no charge. This means that its creators cannot require each user to pay a license fee to fund development. Instead, a number of alternative models for funding its development have emerged. Software can be developed as a consulting project for one or more customers. The customers pay to direct the developers' efforts: to have bugs prioritized and fixed or features added. Companies or independent consultants can also charge for training, installation, technical support, or customization of the software. Another approach to funding is to provide the software freely, but sell licenses to proprietary add-ons such as data libraries. For instance, an open-source CAD program may require parts libraries which are sold on a subscription or flat-fee basis. Open-source software can also promote the sale of specialized hardware that it interoperates with. Some example cases are the Asterisk telephony software developed by a manufacturer of PC telephony hardware Digium, or the Robot Operating System (ROS) robotics platform by Willow Garage and Stanford AI Labs. Many open source software projects have begun as research projects within universities, as personal projects of students or professors, or as tools to aid scientific research. The influence of universities and research institutions on open source shows in the number of projects named after their host institutions, such as BSD Unix, CMU Common Lisp, or the NCSA HTTPd which evolved into Apache. Companies may employ developers to work on open-source projects that are useful to the company's infrastructure: in this case, it is developed not as a product to be sold but as a sort of shared public utility. A local bug-fix or solution to a software problem, written by a developer either at a company's request or to make his/her own job easier, can be released as an open-source contribution without costing the company anything. A larger project such as the Linux kernel may have contributors from dozens of companies which use and depend upon it, as well as hobbyist and research developers. Also, there exists stipends to support the development of open source software like Google's Summer of Code founded 2005. A new funding approach for open source projects is crowdfunding, organized over web platforms like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or Bountysource. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Business models for open-source software」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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