Matt Asay

Matt Asay has been involved with Linux for the past few years, both professionally and academically. Asay is part of Novell's Linux Business Office and chairs the company's Open Source Review Board, and is responsible for laying the strategic and business foundation for Novell's use of open source software. Asay also plays the role of OSS evangelist for Novell, both within and outside the company.

Before Novell, Asay was General Manager at Lineo, an embedded Linux software startup, where he ran Lineo's Residential Gateway business. Asay earned his Juris Doctorate degree at Stanford Law School, spending two of his three years studying software licensing and innovation, and specifically the GNU General Public License, under Professor Larry Lessig. Before Lineo and Stanford, Asay worked in the investment arm of Mitsui Co. where he co-managed Mitsui's investment in Cobalt (a successful Linux-based microserver startup that was acquired by Sun Microsystems).

Matt's talk is titled "Making Money on Free: Revenue Models for Open Source Businesses"

Abstract: It appears that the day of 80% margins for software are over. Though IBM still publicly claims 83% software margins, open source is increasingly cutting into margins for IBM, and every other software company. Indeed, open source is challenging the very notion of intellectual property, the lever used by ISVs to collect "rents" on their innovations.

This presentation details new models for making money on free and open source software. It also suggests that the best models are those that acknowledge and respect the seachange that open source has forced upon the industry, rather than fight against it. It will detail the experiences of several companies (hardware and software, at both the startup and Fortune 500 levels) in moving to these new models, and suggest ways for existing companies to make the transition from closed source to open source.

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