Venture capital plays an important role in open source: It funds startups innovative commercial open source products for the benefit of all as part of the equation. For venture capital to keep flowing, the startup needs to make money eventually, at a level similar to traditional software startups. This is always achieved by withholding something […]

Thomas Otter and Dave Kellogg of The SaaS Product Power Breakfast had me join their show and discuss product management, commercial open source, and cloud service strategies. It is out already as a podcast (local copy). Check it out and make sure to subscribe to their show! Show notes There were a couple of references […]

An open source distribution is a set of open source components configured and put together to work well as one piece of software. A commercial open source distribution is a product that you pay for, and a non-commercial distribution is freely available software. Commercial distributions may be complex products, but not all complex products are […]

While a comparatively young industry, the software industry nevertheless has a history, and taking from the playbook of other disciplines, understanding our history is important to understanding our future. So I want to ask: What (if any) historic periods are there in single-vendor open source firms?

tl;dr The communities that form around community open source are very different from those that form around commercial open source; confuse them at your own risk. The recent announcement by Elastic to relicense their software away from open source licenses to commercial and source-available licenses only has triggered the debate about rights and expectations of […]