Broad variety of support and consulting services for their distributed open source solutions. Nevertheless, these open source projects do not include an inherent warranty or legal liability. Due to its benefits, the dual license approach is becoming increasingly popular. Several well- known companies such as MySQL, Sun, and Ghostscript are using this licensing model. Small and medium-sized software companies can use this approach as a business model to gain and expand new customer bases.

Despite all of its advantages, the dual license approach also has its deficiencies. Potential copyright issues could arise, if code from third parties is included in the solution. Although it might improve the quality of the open source project, it is difficult to integrate these improvements in the commercial version. Both parties have to agree that code can be used in the commercial counterparts. Another issue is lost revenues for the software vendor, since some customers will use the open source version instead of licensing the commercial solution. Open PI Initiative: Scope and Project Experiences But now enough of the theoretical discussions! Let’s have a look at a living example: The Open PI Initiative.

Scope
The Open PI Initiative intends to offer reusable adapters, tools, libraries, and functional add-ons for SAP NetWeaver Process Integration within the open source community.

Download pdf Leveraging SAP NetWeaver Process Integration with Open Source