Up-selling

Up-selling is a sales technique whereby a saleperson attempts to have the customer purchase more expensive items, upgrades, or other add-ons in an attempt to make a more profitable sale. Up-selling usually involves marketing more profitable services or products, but up-selling can also be simply exposing the customer to other options he or she may not have considered previously. Up-selling implies selling something that is more profitable or otherwise preferable for the seller instead of the original sale. A different technique is cross-selling in which a seller tries to sell something else in addition to the original sale.

Up-selling is as a open source business model is generally viewed as coexistence of two software projects: an open source one and a closed source one based on it. The open project is usually community driven and provides a product of it's own and the closed source project tries to provide a more polished or specialized version. While most of the users use the free open source product some prefer to by the closed source variant as it often offers some additional features they require or is easier to use.

Companies and projects

One example of such a business model are two commercial companies that build products based on the open source Wine project: CodeWeavers and Transgamin Technologies. Wine is an effort to produce a Win32 comparability layer on top of Unix-like operating systems to allow them run native Windows application. As this objective proved to be a hard one after 10 years of work Wine is still in development stage and making larger application to run on it is often very tricky. But even so the to companies managed to developed specialized versions of Wine that are stable enough to sell. CodeWeavers created CrossOffice which allows to use MS Office on a GNU/Linux operating system. Transgamin Technologies created Cedega that gives you also a wide range of Windows games available on GNU/Linux. Besides improving their commercial products the companies are also one of the biggest contributors to the Wine project. [1]

References

1. Open Life: The Philosophy of Open Source, Henrik Ingo, 2006