I’ll be on a panel at the UC Open Summit 2026 in a few hours. The moderator carved out for me the question: When should you make a COSS play? (She really liked that phrasing.) Here is my panel-size soundbite:
The term “commercial open source” was coined as a marketing term by Clint Oram of SugarCRM, around 2004. SugarCRM provided their software as a commercial product, but also made it available under an open source license. At that time, potential customers were worried that open source means inferior quality, and the term commercial open source was created to assure everyone that this ain’t so.
The insight here is that you need to think your startup from the business side first, open source second. What is your business model? Can you create customer value? Do you know how to capture that value? Once you feel good about this, you can decide to attach an open source strategy to your model.
For us here, there may be many reason to go open source, moral, practical, or regulatory. My point is that in all cases, it should be a deliberate choice in view of business prospects and it should not the starting point.
Still, most of you are here, because you already started with an open source project, so it came first. Now what?
Fortunately, there are sweet spots where an open source strategy makes sense. Here are three examples.
- Developer tooling and infrastructure. Some domains are more approachable than others. Anything developer related needs an open source strategy. Developers know it, love it, expect it. They want not only open code, but also community.
- Digital sovereignty. Some customers really want the promise of not being locked in to a vendor, even if returning to running open source themselves means higher costs. Public agencies in other countries than the U.S.A. are big on this.
- Disruption and innovator’s dilemma. Sometimes, open source may be your only option against an overwhelming closed-source incumbent. Open source gives you a differentiator and a foothold. Still, business comes first and the market needs to be there.
To recap: You should think business model first, open source second, and only go open source if this is really you.
My current research on commercial open source is being performed with the help of Stephanie Lieggi and James Davis of UC Santa Cruz’ Center for Research on Open-Source Software.
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