Open source standards and proprietary profit

I chatted yesterday with Roy Fielding and Santi Pierini atDay Software.Roy is the chief scientist, Santi the vice president for productstrategy. They told me what is now a familiar story of open sourcestandards leading to proprietary profit.
Day, a 13-year old ECM vendor, considers a technology it calledthe Content Bus its “secret sauce.” That’s a pun because it wasoriginally developed for McDonald’s, in order to help both American andJapanese executives access a highly-detailed real estate database.
Day created a standardized version of the Content Bus, under Java, asJSR170. The software was released a little over a year ago. Where this getsinto the area of open source was that it was used as the basis for theApache Jackrabbit project, which is licensed under the Apache license.
Part of our goal was to have other projects adopt it as theirstorage layer,” Fielding explained. Jackrabbit  “is an implementationof the content repository API as well as a working resource for ourreference implementation. We donated a license to the Apache SoftwareFoundation, and our developers work with Apache to move it forward.”That software was released a few months ago.
By giving away the how, Day became the who, as in who you gonna callif you want to link big ECM projects together. But by using the Apachelicense Day was able to do more than that.
Day created theContent Repository Extreme (CRX). which adds management functions to the Jackrabbit code, and which makesDay a one-stop shop for managing big data repositories.
The result is a profitable company with two product lines, contentapplications and content infrastructure. The application layer includescustom JSR-170 connectors, and the infrastructure layer is the CRXrepository. Day creates repositories for firms likeeMusic.It also creates JSR170 connectors to proprietary repositories, likethose of FileNet, Interwoven, Vignette, OpenText, even some Microsoftproducts.
The point is that open source helps build standards which evenproprietary outfits can then profit from, although I think Pierini saidit better than I can:
Using open source gave us access to a new channel. The enterprise,open source, and repository communities tend to be separate. We couldbring them together with a standards agenda. There have been tens ofmillions of Apache downloads, and to have an offering relating to thataudience gives us broader distribution. Jackrabbit let us propagatefurther than pure Java.”