Reading through a Jane's Strategic Advisory Services report entitled "Open Source Software in Defense Markets" (PDF), I was struck by this passage:
A key trend in the current software and IT environment is the convergence of open source and commercial software approaches. While significant differences do and will continue to exist, both open source and commercial providers are increasingly taking hybrid approaches to providing software and software support.
Some open source providers, such as Red Hat for example, have sought to monetize open source in ways that are not always compatible with long-held open source movement principles and have also created support teams that are in many ways not dissimilar to the commercial software model.
Commercial providers have taken various approaches to "opening up" their software and are either adopting open source solutions or increasingly allowing users to examine and monitor code and provide feedback about this code to support teams directly through established forums.
In other words, we are all hybrid vendors now.
Granted, Microsoft sponsored the research, and may have had an ax to grind in informing some of the research, though Jane's is a reputable defense-focused consulting firm and wouldn't stray far from its findings to appease Microsoft. Regardless, what Jane's writes is true, or largely true: open source and proprietary software are converging.
Open source needs some hook - however mild - to encourage prospects to pay, thereby earning a reasonable return and justifying further open-source development. Proprietary companies, for their parts, are looking to open source as a new distribution channel for their products, plus want to tap into the development benefits open source can afford.
Back in 2003 I thought I was clever when interviewing at Red Hat because my resume declared that I had helped to devise a "mixed-source model" for a former employer. The person interviewing me looked at me blankly and said, "Mixed source? Why?" It was a classic moment, but I failed with what should have been a classic response: "Because, like Red Hat, I think the right business model balances customer freedom with the ability to generate solid returns for shareholders."
Red Hat rightly gets credit for its open-source ethos, but as former Red Hat executive Marc Fleury has long suggested, Red Hat essentially offers a proprietary binary distribution of Linux in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This doesn't make it evil. It makes it smart. Customers can get around paying for RHEL, if they wish, but when presented with the value and comparative freedom of RHEL, most choose to pay.
We are leaving the land of open source versus proprietary religious dogma. Open source is a better distribution and development model than traditional proprietary software, or can be. But there are benefits to proprietary software, too. Used in conjunction with the customer's best interests in mind but not forgetting the vendor's interest, a hybrid model makes a lot of sense.
Dana Blankenhorn suggests that add-ons make good business sense for Acquia and other open-source vendors, and he's dead-on. Zimbra climbed to $20 million in just two years on the back of a successful add-on strategy to its open-source Microsoft Exchange killer. SugarCRM is doing well with such a strategy, too.
It's not, however, simply a way to make money. It's also a way to better define and feed community.
Seem counterintuitive? Perhaps it is for those companies like Red Hat, Acquia, and others that are built to harvest preexisting open-source communities (Linux and Drupal, respectively). But for companies like Zimbra, MySQL, etc., an add-on strategy enables a vendor to focus wholly on delivering a quality open-source project while simultaneously creating a robust, scalable business.
SugarCRM's John Roberts has been saying this for years, and Marten Mickos of MySQL (now Sun) has been suggesting this strategy for the past year as MySQL looked for ways to strengthen its revenue while keeping its community strong. The two need not be conflicting strategies.
In fact, they're complementary. It's actually quite difficult to distribute a 100 percent open-source product and monetize it at the same time. Support doesn't scale. Determining how to make a "community" release compelling while also selling an "enterprise" release without selling "just support" is tricky.
... Read more
The Sun faithful who attended the CommunityOne Conference this morning may not have noticed, but Sun and its MySQL executives were very clear about Sun's open-source strategy going forward, despite news reports that seem to have missed the nuances:
The core will always be 100 percent open source. The periphery...will not. Or might not. It depends.
In response to my first question of the CommunityOne panel Marten Mickos, Senior Vice President of Sun's Database Group, declared, "I just want to say that the core of MySQL will always be 100 percent free and open source." The crowd loved it. Ian Murdock said roughly the same thing: The core will be open....
The periphery? Marten indicated that this would be subject to a corporate calculus designed to determine how much peripheral, closed extensions the company can make to encourage purchases without alienating its community.
Sun's future (and according to some, all of our futures) is hybrid. Is this a bad thing?
... Read moreSometimes popularity isn't worth the trade-offs it may require, it would seem. Anyway, not for Joomla!, as Linux.com highlights in an article yesterday. The Joomla! team had apparently allowed proprietary extensions to its GPL code base as a way to grow in popularity, but the effect has been to breed mistrust and confusion.
Joomla's original intention was arguably a good one: be very "open" to outside development - of proprietary and open source kinds - so as to serve a more diverse community:
It seemed that Joomla! had created a thriving economy for developers, arguably because its tolerance for proprietary extensions attracted entrepreneurs who discovered an audience hungry for inexpensive but useful add-ons. Further solidifying the third-party developers' position that they were within their rights to develop non-GPL addons, Landry and others explicitly stated in Joomla! forums that the decision about whether to allow proprietary extensions was up to the copyright holder. In a June 2006 topic entitled "1.5 licence change clarification," Landry wrote that the Joomla! license in version 1.5 would "make sure that commercial third-party developers that use Joomla! as a platform can do so without fear of having to release GPL."
The problem, however, is that it's hard to serve two masters. ... Read more
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