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A Simple Model of the Organizational Support of Open Source Projects

I’m very much interested in the governance of open source projects, in particular if these are user-led projects. Getting students up to speed can be frustrating, though, as there is no established terminology and you need to have a fair bit of business and industry understanding, in particular about the U.S. system, in order to get started. With this post, I’m proposing a basic terminology to talk about the organizational structure underlying the governance of open source projects.

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How Software Engineering Teaching and the Legal Department Collide

Any non-trivial university has a legal department, often several (at least one for matters of teaching and one for matters of fundraising). The legal department concerned with teaching has to protect the university from lawsuits by students. By extension, this department protects students from professors who ask too much of them. Often, there may be good reasons for this. Sometimes it gets in the way of effective teaching.

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Inverted Research Funding

Most people believe that scientists first perform basic (“fundamental”) research and then perform applied research. Basic research delivers the fundamental insights that then get detailed and refined as they hit reality in applied research. Along with this comes the request that basic research funding should be provided by the country (because few companies would ever pay for it) before industry kicks in and supports applied research. Nothing could be further from the situation in my engineering process research.

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Translation (to German) of Interview on Open Source in the Public Sector

I recently was interviewed about open source in the public sector and blogged my answers here:

t3n magazin now (liberally) translated these to German. Check it out: Ich denke, dass Software mit offenem Quelltext längst gewonnen hat. (local copy).

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Why Open Source is Good for Your Economy (FOSSC19 Recap)

It is no secret that software is everywhere. No traditional product has remained untouched, whether the product is being produced using software or whether software is an integral part of it. As part of this wave of digitization, established vendors from outside the software industry need to avoid that someone else will reap all the profits from their products. That someone else would be software companies that supply needed components. In particular software platforms can have such network effects that their providers can reach a monopoly position so that dependent vendors who need the platform will face a diminishing profit margin.

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Free-to-Use, Unless You Are a Cloud Provider (The New Strategy?)

On the heels of my talk about the current licensing challenges to single-vendor open source firms, I want to discuss the resulting strategy for vendors selling to developers.

Single-vendor open source firms go to market by providing software they developed to the world under an open source license. The goal is to create a large non-paying user base, from which customers are acquired using a variety of incentives. One type of single-vendor open source projects are application component projects like MongoDB (a NoSQL database) or Confluent Platform (a stream processing platform based on Apache Kafka). It is these types of companies which ran into licensing problems.

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Why Now? And Who? The Struggle Over Single-Vendor / Open-Core Licensing

In yesterday’s talk I reviewed the current licensing struggle of single-vendor open source firms. Single-vendor open source firms go to market by providing software they developed for free, under an open source license, while also offering a commercially licensed version of this software, possibly with extensions and services that customers may want to pay for. Because of the open source version of this software, large cloud vendors can compete with the original vendor for running this software as a service. They did this so well that some single-vendor firms decided to change their future licensing to a proprietary license to stall the competition, irking the open source community and creating a backlash on many sides.

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Single-Vendor Open Source at the Crossroads (Slides) #lfosls

I’ll be giving a presentation on single-vendor open source today at the Linux Foundation Open Source Leadership Summit 2019.

Abstract: Most venture capital funding in open source flows to single-vendor open source firms. With the struggles over licensing in the cloud, these companies find themselves at the crossroads: Stay true to open source or move to proprietary licenses, abandoning the goodwill and opportunities that come with open source? In this talk I will review how this business model works, discuss the challenges posed to vendors by large cloud providers, and review the options on the table.

If you liked the slides, you might like the paper as well.

Next up: Why now? And who? The struggle over single-vendor / open-core licensing.

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The Importance of Product Management

Another role or function that is often confusing to Germany high-tech companies is product management. Startups tend to get it right these days, but large organizations often remain unfazed by a lack of strong product management.

A product manager is responsible for defining the product innovation and associated business plan (strategic product management) as well as working out features to a level of detail (technical product management) so that they can be passed on to engineering. As the saying goes,

A product manager is responsible for building the right product, while an engineering manager is responsible for building the product right.

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