The Cloud Makes It Rain Money: The Business in Cloud Computing - Deploying and Managing a Cloud Infrastructure - page 350

to give away the documentation for free as well. Purchasing the documentation can make it
much easier for users to learn an application.
Another way of making money is to share expertise about an application by authoring a
topic and selling it either through e-publishing channels or traditional topic publishers.
The author does not have to be the developer of the software, just an avid user.
Consultancy A developer with experience installing, using, or customizing any open-
source application—all marketable skills—can sell their expertise by being a consultant.
Organizations are mostly on the lookout for project-based help from experts. Online
resources such as Elance and Guru provide freelance portals that put employers and
expert resources in touch with each other.
Dual Licensing Software can be released under both an open-source license and a separate
proprietary license for, say, an enterprise edition. For customers, the open-source, free edition
can be a part of an upsell to a commercial enterprise edition. An example of this is the MySQL
database, which is dual-licensed by Oracle under a commercial proprietary license and GNU
Public License version 2 (GPLv2).
Ad-Supported Software Companies can advertise supported software against a com-
pensation sum in return. For example, Google funds the AdBlock Plus add-on for web
browsers, which prevents white-listed acceptable ads from being removed by the browser.
Another example is SourceForge, an open-source project service provider that advertises
banner sales on its website.
Voluntary Donations With the donation model, funds are collected for large-scale projects
requiring additional money. The campaigns are also used for projects that do not have other
major funding sources. For example, Wikipedia launches a donation campaign every year to
pay off its annual salaries and expenses. In 2004, the Mozilla Foundation had a fundraising
campaign to support the launch of the Firefox 1.0 web browser.
Selling Merchandise Some open-source organizations also sell branded merchandise
articles such as T-shirts and coffee mugs to collect additional funds and expand the user
community. Wikimedia Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, and Ubuntu Foundation are all
organizations that sell merchandise.
White Label Branding
White label branding is the rebranding and sale of a product or a service that is not
manufactured by the seller. The product/service is purchased by a marketer (a company)
from a producer (another company) along with selling rights to the product/service.
Marketing and manufacturing companies follow a business-to-business (B2B) model.
Some marketing companies may offer products without any investment in the technology
or infrastructure. This can increase the sales for a manufacturing company by having a
marketer sell a white label version of its product or service. The biggest gain for a marketer
is the addition of another product or service, thus enlarging the portfolio.