gregw

Open Source is Free Software

Open source business plans are tough.  It's hard to come up with a clear and comprehendable revenue model when you give so much of your work away for free.

But those of us who work in open source, must not forget that freedom is the at core of our model and that we must grant those freedoms on a non-discrimanatory basis. Recently I've seen several postings that make me concerned that some core principals are being forgotten.

Firstly LWN reported on the Linux Plumbers Conference, where the key-note from Greg Kroah-Hartman tried to shame Canonical for not contributing enough kernel patches back from their work on ubuntu:

Then Rod Johnson blog on springsofts maintenance describes the ideal open source business model as:

Another example of this thinking comes from the blog of Jack Slocum from Ext.js:

While I have some sympathy with Rod's and Greg's positions, I do believe they are forgetting something fundamental. The users of our Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) are free from any obligation to contribute back patches or cash. FOSS licenses don't say "you are free to use this unless you are making money" and they don't say "legally speaking your not obligated to contribute cash or code, but morally you really should".

What Greg Kroah-Hartman needs to remember, is that contributions are not just code or cash. Growing market share, educating users, finding new uses are all great contributions to an open source project.

What Rod is forgetting, is that spring software is now a free commodity, to be used without cost. The expensive valuable resource that  Springsoft should focus their marketing on is the clever people that created spring.

What Jack needs to realize is that major publicly traded corporations are unlikely to integrate closed source, proprietary licensed software into their core infrastructure if it it comes from a small operation without major support infrastructure.  My mother frequently asks: "why don't you just charge $1 per month to all those hundreds of thousands of Jetty users?" and I realize that my mother has never tried to obtain a purchase order from a major publicly traded corporation.

At Webtide, we sell developer advice, custom development and production support for jetty and dojo cometd. We don't expect our clients to buy our services because of some sort of guilt trip from the value they obtain from those projects. We expect our clients to pay for the value add that we give.  The software is free under the terms of the apache 2.0 license and we expect no charity or moral obligation in return.  But our developers are highly skilled, and if you want their advice, effort and/or experience directly applied to your commercial concerns, then you have to pay for that valuable resource.

I consider it a confirmation of the quality and value of the project when large corporations make it part of their infrastructure or ship product that contains it. I'm glad that many users can often succeed on their own without questions, or producing bug reports and/or fixes. It indicates that the project is doing a good job of well designing, implementing and documenting our software for those users. When Jetty users are profitable, we don't see that as a lost revenue opportunity, but as a potential client who already should appreciate the value of the skills we have on offer.

You can't be half free. For those struggling with open source business models, my (free) advice is to embrace the freedom that is fundamental to the success of your project and don't resent the success of others who use the freedoms that you have granted. If you want to sell software, then don't open it or get a job at Microsoft, IBM or Oracle.

Posted at 10:52AM Oct 14, 2008 by gregw in General  |  Comments[5]