There are many ways to make money off of open source software. A few used in the IT sector might apply to the business environment surrounding voting systems. Firms such as 10X Software make money off of integrating IT systems into operating environments. A similar idea could be extended to voting, where a system integrator would incorporate open source voting system software and voting hardware to produce a voting solution for a state or local jurisdiction. Some firms, such as Wild Open Source, structure their business around targeted development of open source software. A software firm could be hired by a jurisdiction to add, fix or modify certain features of an open source voting system to their own specifications. This could ensure that specific functionality, such as supporting Instant Runoff Voting, was available in the technology that the customer was going to purchase. This also has the benefit that a feature could be added to the software before the open source voting system as a whole was certified and minimize the costs of having to re-certify a base system with the contracted modifications. Dual licensing is where a company offers the same software under two different software licenses, usually one being free software or open source and the other being a commercial license.Of course, under copyright law, a copyright holder can license their works under as many licenses as they like. This can allow their product to benefit from some aspects of open source development while also allowing their customers, commercial and non-commercial, flexibility in their licensing options. For example, MySQL AB offers its MySQL database software freely under the terms of the GNU GPL, but also allows companies to purchase commercial licenses that permit them to deviate from the terms of the GPL. In the voting systems context, a vendor could offer its software for free under a disclosed or open source license, but then charge commercial users to build variants. Companies could use the open source software simply to sell their hardware. That is, with open source software running their voting hardware, they can devote more resources to ensuring that their voting hardware is innovative and as cutting-edge and economical as their customers demand. For example, to concentrate their efforts at selling their high-quality hardware, Apple computer has embraced open source software as the core of their Mac OS X operating system.However, as this article goes to press, there are indications that Apple has closed pieces of its software in a strategy to prevent people from running their software on non-Apple hardware. See: Tom Yager, Apple closes down OS X, InfoWorld, May 17, 2006, availabe at: https://www.infoworld.com/article/06/05/17/78300_21OPcurve_1.html.
Some ways that companies use to make money off of open source do not translate well to the voting systems market. For example, Google's business strategy involves running optimized web search services on server clusters running the Linux operating system. Given the concerns and problems with networking in election systems, it would be difficult for a company to make money off of running open source voting software remotely. IBM sells proprietary software that works on top of or in concert with open source software. A company that tried to do this in the voting market would have to marshal each version of its software package through certification, and then it would only be partially open as a whole.