The New Economics of Open Source Applications
As we all know, the price of acquisition for any type of open source software is usually right. Now people can and do argue about the total cost of ownership of software over a three to five year period. But in tough economic times expediency usually wins out over any argument about what might be happening three years or more down the road. Cases in point are Alfresco Software, which makes an enterprise content management system and xTuple, a maker of enterprise resource planning (ERP) application software, are both reporting noticeable increase in demand.
Alfresco executives say they are seeing quarter over quarter revenue growth of 50 to 100 percent form other 600 enteprise customers and there has been a 25 percent increase in the number of leads they are seeing this quarter compared to last quarter. xTuple executives, meanwhile, say the number of downloads they've seen for there ERP software that runs on top of the PostgreSQL database has moved past 170,000. Furthermore, the company says there is somewhere between 15,000 to 20,000 people participating in its community.
