But unlike the OED, there is a VC-funded shark pool full of startups struggling to establish a viable business model for this market. In order to improve relevancy, search engines have begun to compile potential results into directories that further narrow a user's search to a more specific context. But for poor, understaffed editing teams, this is a little like sifting sand through a tennis racquet. The obvious answer is to staff up the Editing Department, but with the pressure on search companies to deliver actual profits, additional headcount is no way to improve margins. The ODP, in contrast, puts a New Economy twist on this entire affair.
Open source is seen as both a threat and an opportunity to a major industry.
The concept of copyrighted ownership and the ability to derive revenues, let alone profits, did not originally factor into this model. These things did, however, factor into GNUhoo's founders' plans. In September 1998, the newly formed company began to create its Web directory in a fashion not unlike Professor Murray had more than a century before, by recruiting volunteer editors and assembling Web site submissions into thousands of categories. Soon, however, they came under pressure from the GNU Project, who pointed out that GNUhoo did not actually comply with the GNU guidelines. Its product, while free to the end-user, was not open in the sense that anyone could access and adapt its source code.