JBoss CEO Marc Fleury seems to agree with the idea that building quality software calls for dedicated developers. He calls his company's business model "professional open source," and he prides himself on hiring programmers to work full-time on open source code. But can the classic open source business model really provide the kind of revenue needed to support true innovation?

You can't make money giving away products. You can, however, profit by selling support and services around those products, and that's the way many open source companies, including JBoss, are run. Customers can download the code for nothing, but if they want somebody to call when things start falling apart, they have to pay.

The interesting thing about this model is that when you strip it down to brass tacks it looks an awful lot like an insurance business. Customers pay for a number to call even though they hope to never dial it. The problem is that in practice these support contracts don't work like health insurance; they're more like dental insurance.

With group health insurance, everybody pays but only a few get sick. As long as the majority of group members are young and healthy, the insurance provider still turns a profit, even if a few members file major claims.

Dental plans aren't structured quite the same way, for one main reason: With dental insurance, everybody files. What's the first thing you do when you join a new dental plan? Get your teeth checked. That's why the deductibles are so high and the annual caps so low. Dental plans are structured to let every subscriber get two check-ups per year, in hopes that regular preventative care will ward off bigger problems. Anything extra comes out of the insurer's bottom line.