By announcing that it has open-sourced its Launchpad project under the Affero GPL version 3, a year after rumors swirled that it would, has Canonical licensed away one of its best revenue opportunities?
Roughly two years ago, I walked up London's High Road from Seven Sisters Tube Station with Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. Mark and I talked about a range of things, but one of the things that particularly caught my attention was Launchpad, a collaboration and hosting platform for open-source projects that makes it easy to track code, ideas, and other things across projects.
Then, as now, Launchpad struck me as a fertile field for Canonical to discover a scalable, winning business model to support Ubuntu development. In fact, I remember a long conversation with open-source guru Larry Augustin about Launchpad. Augustin felt that there was a great business lurking in Launchpad.
I agreed.
While I can see how "opening up Launchpad gives the free-software world the beginnings of an open, programmatic interface to its own infrastructure," as Canonical speculates, I'm struggling to see how it helps Canonical make money. Any chance of directly monetizing Launchpad is effectively gone now.
That, of course, may not be the point. Canonical has been experimenting with other models, including hosted services that may well be augmented by this move.
As RedMonk analyst James Governor suggests, "(It may be) possible to make money as a tools company, without owning the runtime, if you offer hosting for the apps. IDE (integrated development environment) + cloud = dollars." Open source may help to make Launchpad more widely used, which, in turn, better positions it to be a Canonical-sponsored on-ramp to the Canonical-monetized cloud.
Not a bad idea. (Certainly better than the apperi-sponsored Ubuntu application store, as reported by The VAR Guy.)
It does suggest, however, that Canonical may be placing a lot of eggs in the cloud basket, a basket that has yet to prove that it can deliver solid, consistent returns to software companies. It comes with its own baggage, as Jonathan Zittrain writes).
Time will tell if the cloud can feed Canonical's employees. But Shuttleworth isn't the sort of person to do something just because all the "in" kids are open-sourcing these days. Licensing Launchpad under the AGPL version 3 is a calculated move. We just don't know what the calculus will yield quite yet.
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I was fortunate to catch up Thursday with Stuart Cohen, CEO and founder of the Collaborative Software Initiative. Stuart used to run OSDL where he got to talk with people at large enterprises that have adopted open source, and learned quite a bit about enterprise interest in not only consuming open source, but also creating open source.
Stuart Cohen
(Credit: Collaborative Software Initiative)To help foster both interests Stuart founded CSI in 2007. I asked him how things have progressed since CSI's founding:
Asay: Collaborative Software Initiative is going on 18 months now. How has the company evolved since you founded it in April 2007?
Cohen: I'm really proud to say that our original concept has been validated in multiple verticals with very different projects. Based on my early conversations with customers during my time as CEO of Open Source Development Labs, I saw an untapped opportunity to build communities in vertical markets to develop software at a fraction of the cost of traditional software models.
We believe, and again this has been validated over the last year, that communities lower cost, provide a "network effect" for companies adopting these applications and build sustainability for future growth of an application.
... Read more
The GNU General Public License (GPL), unlike Apache-style licensing, offers perhaps the best way to prevent a community from forking. It's therefore not surprising to see the Collaborative Software Initiative turning to the Affero GPL Version 3 to help foster and protect its budding TriSano community.
Eben Moglen, director of the Software Freedom Law Center and co-author of the AGPLv3, agrees:
By offering the code under the widely used AGPLv3 license, Collaborative Software Initiative gives the user community the assurance of knowing that the code can be modified, customized, and shared in a low-friction way to suit their very specific project requirements. AGPLv3 was written as a roadmap to foster the most open, transparent and collaborative open source and free software communities possible.
"Open" is in the eyes of the beholder--there is a longstanding debate between the GPL and BSD/Apache communities as to which is more open--but there's little debate that GPL offers a more robust way to provide incentives against forking a project. TriSano will be better for having all participants rowing in the same direction. AGPLv3 gives them this.
One question, though: why AGPLv3 instead of simply GPLv3? Is there an element of Web-based distribution here against which CSI is hoping to guard?
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