Category: 1.5 Commercial Open Source
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What now, open source infrastructure startups?
It took exactly eight days for the Linux Foundation to announce they’ll be hosting a fork of the last open source version of the popular Redis key value store after its owner announced a license change to the SSPLv1, a source-available (non-open-source) license. The fork is well supported by industry heavyweights, and it appears industry…
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How to think about a dependency on commercial open-source software
Another day in open source land, another vendor relicensing away from an open source license to a source-available license. What was new for me this time, however, was that Apache Flink, a community open source project, had a dependency on Lightbend’s Akka, the commercial open source project that relicensed. This is surprising, because in my…
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What’s next after “source-available”?
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…
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Podcast on product management and commercial open source
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…
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Open source distributions by life-cycle
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…
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Historic periods in (single-vendor) commercial open source
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? Please note that I’m asking about single-vendor open source…