The open source business model

There's a lot of debate on the validity of building a flourishing business on top of open source technologies like WordPress. More often than not, this resilience is directly related to past ideals that are quickly becoming extinct. Thanks to open source technology, we, the people, can now compete on the same playing field as the biggest colossal companies in the world. Open source is empowerment.

Open source, if used properly, can also be insanely profitable. Take Google for example; practically all of the technology that powers Google is open source. Google also continually supports and releases code back to the community. Apple, the company that most view as "closed", heavily relies on open source code for almost all of its products. Safari, Apple's web browser, is based on the open source project "Webkit", which, ironically, is the same base project that Google uses for its own web browser, Chrome.

Open source matters big time—but it depends on how you use...