Sustainable Business Model

May 21, 2003 (Yue)

1. Narrative

Once a Web model for supporting open source courseware development has successfully been developed, building a sustainable business model should be relatively easy. The main reason is the low cost structures. There are no inventory to keep or transactions to perform. Unlike other content sites such as visionlearning.com [visionlearning], authors are volunteer-based and there is cost for content development. Even marketing cost is minimal as users will probably be attracted by the merits of the site more than by advertisement. For example, Sourceforge.net had minimal advertisement.

Sourceforget.net mainly attracts developers as most projects may have their own home pages for detailed information and download. On the other hand, our project has a potentially much larger set of audiences, including both instructors and students. Although not yet completely designed at this moment, the project's licenses are likely to include the 'attribution' license of creative commons [creativecommonlicenses]. The attribution license requires users of the courseware to give credits to the project, allowing an easy way for students to check out the modules and submodules of the same topic that have not been used by their instructors.

There are several possible business models:

• Form a startup company to support a standalone Website for the project.
• Support a standalone Website as a component of a company. For example, Sourceforge.net is a componet of Open Source Development Network (OSDN).
• Embedd the project into related existing Website, such as Sourceforge.net.

It is also possible that the Website may be purchased by established publishers.

2. References

[visionlearning] Vision learning's home page, http://visionlearning.com/.
[creativecommonlicenses] Create Common's licenses: http://creativecommons.org/learn/licenses/.