Secret to Open Source

There is an article on CNET with the CEO of Red Hat about the Secret to Open Source Success.

"How to make money (in open source)? A lot of people started with the support model...What Red Hat did was fundamentally different...It's not about trying to monetize the bits or the services. Everybody can do that. The key insight is that the development model of open source is around iteration."

As Elliot Noss has stated, it is about making the tech experience wicked easy for the user. That's what Apple did with the iPod and the iPhone. Both have a consumer based GUI, not a GUI made by some techie that never used the interface (cause he does everything by command line). That's your job: Make it easy for Grandma to use a video phone or a photo sharing site or a webcam. Period.