Open-source projects to provide corporate benefits?
I spent some time talking with an Accenture veteran this morning, and came away with an intriguing idea: enable open-source projects to provide corporate benefits like health insurance to their developers so that they can ditch their day jobs to focus on their open-source passion.
If you've ever started a small business, you know that getting "enterprise-grade" benefits like health insurance is very difficult. At Alfresco, for example, we ultimately joined a PEO (Professional Employer Organization) called Trinet [PDF], which aggregates many smaller companies to negotiate insurance plans with companies like Blue Cross Blue Shield that would normally not consider providing small companies insurance.
Yes, individuals can get insurance, but it tends to be very expensive to go it alone.
In the recession there will be an increasing number of people that lose their jobs, but there will also be a rising number of enterprises that need to maintain legacy systems, build new ones, and otherwise drive innovation and productivity while cutting costs. As more companies turn to open source for this benefit, why couldn't open-source projects "employ" more of their developers to provide basic corporate benefits like health insurance?
Developers would pay into the project a nominal fee/commission on services rendered to cover the project's cost of administrative overhead. But the developer would take care of financial arrangements with the end-customer. The project would simply be an administrator of benefits like health insurance and would be responsible for maintaining the brand.
This would enable more developers to have flexibility, benefits, and an organization to help improve their personal brands. It would also lead to better open-source software. It would enable a Maven developer, for example, to spend even more time working on Maven without going hungry.
Ultimately, a consulting organization like Accenture really is nothing more than an aggregation of personal brands, one that serves as a pseudo-guarantee of quality to a customer. When General Mills hires Accenture, it's doing so to ensure a steady, predictable stream of quality services.
Open-source projects can provide this Accenture-like benefit, as well. What am I missing? Is this a bad idea or does it have potential?
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. 
- by Calitalieh February 12, 2009 3:09 PM PST
- Interesting idea, especially given your observation about what a firm like Accenture actually provides (I know, I was a Partner at the firm).
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(4 Comments)Along those line, here is another question for you: why is it that large consulting firms have no pro-active, strategic, or even operational capabilities/IP in the OSS arena? Most of them still derive over 60% of their SI fees from SAP and Oracle implementations; a competing interest when facing a CIO who needs sound advice. Why not have a "suitability model" or some capabilities that can identify, and then renovate proprietary code over to custom or packaged OSS? Why not use their development factories (that are currently running idle) for large scale renovation?
The F500 still turn to the Big 5 (or whats left of them) for council. There must be an executive at one of them who can see that the current model is unsustainable, and that "he who leads the change will benefit the most." Needless to say, I didn't win that battle.