> Can you demonstrate in these other cases that Oracle, for example, was first used by people who thought it was "cool" and insisted on it being free, and worked their way up to "people should pay $150k a year on this"?
No, I cannot do that :-). What I think you are noticing is a change in the business and adoption models. While not being an economist, my hypothesis is that open source was one of the main causes of these changes.
Going back to your question, the closest things that come to mind in the data space that could give us some more info are:
1. Neo4j and InfiniteGraph (graph databases)
2. Cloudera and MapR (Hadoopy)
As far as I know (unfortunately without any real data though) is that both Neo4j and Cloudera are doing quite well financially. On the other hand that's not to say that the model chosen by InfiniteGraph and MapR isn't working.
No, I cannot do that :-). What I think you are noticing is a change in the business and adoption models. While not being an economist, my hypothesis is that open source was one of the main causes of these changes.
Going back to your question, the closest things that come to mind in the data space that could give us some more info are:
1. Neo4j and InfiniteGraph (graph databases) 2. Cloudera and MapR (Hadoopy)
As far as I know (unfortunately without any real data though) is that both Neo4j and Cloudera are doing quite well financially. On the other hand that's not to say that the model chosen by InfiniteGraph and MapR isn't working.