1. Free Open Source software anyone can download and install

2. Commercial hosted version of the same software so people don’t have download and install but will have to pay.

I would like Matt to talk more about how they support the commercial version (hosted) financially as it might help other open source projects.

It looks to me like they derive revenue from:

1. Inserting Google adverts into hosted blogs

2. Charging for spam protection

3. Upgrades

I think no 1 is fine, although it was a bit of a surprise when I saw Google ads on one of my old blog posts – I didn’t realise upfront that they were going to do that. I would suspect that most bloggers don’t realise that wordpress is running ads on their older blog posts.

No 2 is a bit more of a problem. If they are trying to develop a really good open source product, they should include spam protection as part of that product and not have it as a commercial extra. The akismet service seems to do a fair job of spam protection but there should be an alternative (e.g. a CAPTCHA) for those who don’t want to pay.

I notice that all things d requires registration to post comments. Is this because they don’t want to pay for akismet or because it doesn’t do a good enough job?

I think wordpress is a real success story for the open source movement. I think they may have a business model other open source projects could imitate although I’m a little worried they could be deliberately not developing spam protection in the open source product in order to sell the commercial solution.