Earning Money with Open Source Software

With all the news about the decision of Sun to acquire open source icon MySQL, this reminded me of that particular thread in Slashdot regarding earning money with OSS. Before anything else, US$1Billion is definitely earning money (though still far from 8.5B ). Kudos to the MySQL team, more validation for FOSS being legit.

Aside from the typical support subscription, dual licensing, and other conventional direct business models for FOSS, there are also a lot of ways to earn from it indirectly. Off the top of my head, here are a few I can think of:

1. Open source software usually happens because people just need to "scratch their own itch." For companies and organizations, these itches may be quite different from the current scratchers. Now, reinventing the wheel would be a lot effort (and of course money). In lieu of that, you could always fork an existing open source project to fit your own philosophy, just so long as the license of course would grant you to allow that component to co-exist harmoniously with your proprietary offering. Earning in this case by saving.
2. An organization may open source core but general components of their product without necessarily releasing their specialized offerings to the public. For example, you may have a set of Javascript libraries that is not too specific for your product but not too general that it does not fit into a niche. Being general would give you enough shield not to divulge much of your secret sauce, but specific enough to target a cohesive set of problems which would give it more sense. Think GWT and how little knowledge the public has of the implementation of GMail. So if your open source components gets enough mileage and community support, the stability of the component would definitely enhance your product and, indirectly, your earning power.
3. You may need special tools to address your needs that aren't available yet (or those available aren't sufficient). You could spearhead an open source effort for this. If successful, this tool would hopefully make you more productive, hence more earning potential.
4. Finally, open sourcing parts or your whole product showcases your brilliance as a developer/development organization. The sheer reputation itself could be a great money making tool. Just make sure you do show brilliant codes and design. Quoting Law 5 of The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene: "Through reputation alone you can intimidate and win." This guy would've never been taken seriously, trying to slay a giant, if not for his reputation.