"So, how do you make money?"

Of all the questions while I work our booth here at JavaOne [for Alfresco], the initial exchange typically looks like this:

"I see you guys are an Open Source CMS Alternative, cool... so, how do you make money?"

Sure, there were the subsequent functional questions, comparisons, tech topics, etc - but most people still don't have a baseline knowledge about pricing models in an open source world. Quite illuminating. I would have expected this to be the last question, or at least some rough analogies drawn by default to RedHat or MySQL (/Sun).

Open source may be disruptive on the technology front, but altering peoples' buying habits looks to take longer to sink in. Should be no surprise I suppose: behavioral change always takes the longest.

P.S. Alfresco uses a dual licensing model.