"Approximately 65% of Sleepycat's revenue is from licensing, with the remaining 35% from services (support, training and consulting), which is similar to many proprietary software companies, but different from most open source companies." - Wang

This is hard information to the IT industry that the Open source model is here to stay. The case in point here is Sleepy Cat the company behind Berkeley DB, a company that has been profitable right from 1996. Sleepycat's customers range from telecom and networking leaders such as Cisco, Motorola, and Ericsson, to computing giants, such as Sun, HP, Hitachi and Fujitsu. Sleepycat also does business with some of the Internet giants -- Google, Amazon, America Online (AOL), and Yahoo!, as well as storage leaders such as EMC and Veritas.

Sleepycat has choosen the dual licensing strategy apporach, one a no-cost open source license, like the GPL, and the other is a paid commercial license.The paid commercial license, one that is intended for those customers that want to distribute proprietary code and still use the Berkeley DB open source within their proprietary code. To do so, companies buy a perpetual license. In addition, for an annual fee they are entitled to at least one major upgrade per year, along with the usual technical support and hand-holding.

Source: ITManagers JournalPrashanth RaiTag(s):Open Source