Stuart Cohen, a software company CEO, argues that the freemium business model of open source software—give away the code, charge for the support—is broken because open source software is so good it doesn’t need much support. Putting aside whether that’s true or not, he defines “broken” as “not meeting investor expectations.” An alternative view is that investor expectations for open source software business are unrealistic, and the benefits are felt mostly in cost savings by the users, not revenues to the creators.
