Is commercial open source possible?
The title to this post--"Is commercial open source possible?"--is meant as bait, of course. I work for a commercial open-source company and definitely feel that it's possible. Indeed, without "commerce" I don't think open source would be nearly as mature as it has become. Cash fuels code.
But even so, Larry Lessig raises an interesting question on whether commercial and community ever really mix:
It would be very odd if a friend apologized for missing lunch and offered you $50 to make it up. And it would very, very odd if your girlfriend, at the end of a great date, offered you $500 to spend the night. Or if Wal-Mart asked all customers to "pitch in and help Wal-Mart by sweeping at least one aisle each time you shop." Or if McDonalds asked you to "help out" by promising to buy hamburgers at least once a month. Money in the sharing economy is not just inappropriate; it is poisonous. And "helping out" is not just rare in the commercial economy. It is downright weird.
It's a bit of a gross generalization, but there's a kernel of substance to it. I don't think, however, that the conflict is between community and commercial. The conflict arises when a company tries to feed its community and commercial customers from the same bucket of bits.
As I've noted recently, this can create tensions with one's community because it can lead a company to downplay or even downgrade its community-focused product. In many ways, the approach that Zimbra, SugarCRM, and others take (i.e., clearly separate proprietary extensions or add-ons to the community product) enables a healthier, more open relationship with one's community.
No, community is not inimical to commerce, but there are clearly better ways to mix and mingle the two. The companies that figure this out will be those that dominate the next decade of software. Google has figured it out. So, too, has Red Hat. You?
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
With these, the more you put in yourself, the less you pay. I'll grant you that there's not a one you don't pay anything for at all but the idea of the customer helping keep the cost down for themselves isn't new.
I don't agree with that on the ethical matters, but I do believe that it's fiscally irresponsible at best and damaging to the world economy at worst. This hybrid free-product/paid-service model is not sustainable as the larger the pool of people providing the service (and there's absolutely nothing stopping them) then the less valuable that service is (dilluted cost because of over-supply) and thus the economy as a whole looses value causing deflationary pressures which eventually lead to massive job losses.
- by jrepenning October 21, 2008 11:01 AM PDT
- The fact that it has been, to date, "very very odd" does not mean we can't start doing it now (we, of course, call that "progress"). But the lessons Lessig implies are worth worrying about. Stormy Peters has reported that paying people to contribute to open source tends to cause them to move on to some other open-source project: not the "hiring retention model" most enterprises strive for!
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