I clarified that I wanted the project to be Open Source, saying that I had already made that commitment.

I did not say to him that if he wanted to close-source it, I would abide by his decision; otherwise it would not be a pure gift on my part. I left that part unspoken, yet ready to accept if he pressed the point. I did say to him:

"Can it remain open source?"

"Sure," he said, "I don't know how all that works, what our benefit from it is..." he trailed off.

I knew that he wanted to be assured that he could freely generate income from the source code. I explained to him how MySQL works: it's Open Source, but customers can pay $2500 for the source code also, and even more for some kinds of licensing.

"It's not really the way for a small business to make a living, though," he observed cautiously.

True, I said. IBM makes a lot of money on it. RedHat; it's their whole business model.

S. has intentionally veered away from learning about Open Source because he perceives that it means he will have to give away things instead of selling them. He will not even entertain the full Open Source model because of this one reason--he, and most other proprietary software manufacturers.

"You own the source code. You have two audiences," I said, gesturing with one hand to the left, and the other hand to the right. "One group has some geeks working for them who can take the code and modify it and install it and customize it. The other group are your customers; they are the ones who have no geeks, lots of money, they want your expertise with the code; they continue to pay full rate for the commercial license installation. And the nice thing is you get modifications to the code from geeks all over the world who are grateful for the project."

It flowed; never before have I been able to capture the essence of Open Source and moneymaking in one simple paragraph. S. could see the logic, and accepted the fact that the project will remain open source.