Alex Karasulu: Winston DaMarillo, Friend or Foe to Open Source Movers? true link61 Winston DaMarillo, business man, and founder of several companies including Simula Labs, an incubator for Open Source companies, is working on building a new kind of machine to monotize on the efforts of Open Source movers. Basically Simula provides Open Source developers looking to start a new business with the infrastructure needed to support their business. Level 1 and level 2 support is provided along with a menu of potential clients that his amalgamated company is already doing business with. If Simula can sell your services to clients in their network then they cash in 60% of the revenue. If you bring the business and use their infrastructure for providing 24x7 support along with billing system and insurance coverage then you make 60% off the revenue and simula makes 40%. Interesting model? I've had this idea several times as did others before me. I've even discussed this with Winston and other Apache Members ages ago. Kudos to the man for actually building it. This raises the question whether Simula and Winston, who recently spoke at ApacheCon, are helping Open Source communities or taking advantage of them. This is something that is up to you to decide. There definitely is a break even point where a company can opt to leave this network after growing to some size. How easy is that in practice though? Can the leaving business take existing clients while leaving the network? I remember some folks back in my consulting days complaining about head hunters unfairly making too much over the hard labor of others and these companies/recruiters usually took us for 30-60%. Is this any different? I really don't know if the final result is similar. However I do know that it is not cheap. Certainly enough 1-2 man companies composed of Open Source movers exist around Open Source projects to setup a network but no one has done the leg work to bring together such a network to load balance the opportunity and labor across business leads. Something like this can be built so the overhead of doing it is cheaper than 40-60% but it takes serious initiative. Winston has done the leg work with Simula. Whether he and Simula are a friend or foe to Open Sourcers is a question that I cannot answer. There is however one thing that I can conclude. Winston/Simula is here making a buck because we Open Source people have not mobilized our community around the notion of monotizing on our work. If we were not so lazy and took the initiative to build such a network with the proposed infrastructure we could provide ourselves with the same services although with a much lower overhead. The question is where do you start?