1.4 Commercial Open Source Archives - Software Research and the Industry

2021-10-052021-10-11

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 that is not made available for free, generically called “the complement” in this article. This is not human services (labor), because it doesn’t scale well. Rather, it is intellectual property, usually packaged today with machine services (computing). This does scale well.

2021-06-182021-06-18

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 in the show you might like to have the links to.

The commercial open source course as taught at UC Santa Cruz, starting June 21st, 2021.
Our Harvard business school type free teaching cases for product management.

If I missed a link, let me know, and I’ll add it.

2021-05-292021-05-30

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 distributions.

2021-04-162021-04-16

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?

2021-01-232021-01-23

Two Types of Open Source Communities

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 open source communities again (local copy 1, 2, 3).

Legally speaking, I assume that this is fully within Elastic’s rights. I assume they either outright own all copyright to the relicensed code or collected copyrights by way of contributor license agreements from anyone whose code they accepted into their code base.

2021-01-072021-01-19

First Ph.D. Then Startup (5 min. Video)

This 5 min. lightening talk shows how doctoral students can turn their work into a commercial open source startup. Current opportunities for doing so with me are in the open data and open source robotics space.

2020-10-082020-10-09

Commercial Open Source and the Cloud

I just presented 15 min. of my thoughts on the product management challenge of open source and the role of cloud computing at O4B, the European commercial open source forum. You can watch the video below (local video copy, slide download).

I also make few remarks on the public funding ecosystem for high-tech startups in Germany (hint: it is fabulous). More on this later.

2020-09-162020-09-17

A New Commercial Open Source Conference

I’m glad to report that we will have a new open source conference in Europe, focused on commercial open source. I’ll be a speaker and panelist and helped initiate the event. It is not the first of its kind, but I’m very happy that we have a new one with hopefully more staying power than previous attempts.

2020-04-132021-04-13

Single-Vendor Open Source Firms (Dirk Riehle, IEEE Computer Column)

I’m happy to report that the seventh article in the Open Source Expanded column of IEEE Computer has been published.

Title	Single-Vendor Open Source Firms
Keywords	Open Source, Single-vendor Open Source, Commercial Open Source
Authors	Dirk Riehle, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg
Publication	Computer vol. 53, no. 4 (April 2020), pp. 68-72

Abstract: This article present a particular business model for commercial open source firms, called the single-vendor open source model. This model has long dominated venture capital funding for open source software firms, contributing to the long-term sustainability of open source. As such, it is of high economic relevance. It is also an excellent example to show how open source licensing and related strategies really are just tools in the design of a business model and not philosophies.

As always, the article is freely available (local copy or HTML page).

Also, check out the full list of articles.

2020-03-122020-05-09

Please Help Keep our Language Precise: Single-Vendor Open Source is Neo-Proprietary Source, not Closed Source

When the Open Source Initiative defined open source, it focused only on the license, and ignored the process. Smart entrepreneurs quickly discovered that they could provide to the world their product as open source code and benefit from it, while strictly controllling the process to keep competition at bay. This is called single-vendor open source.

Single-vendor open source is not closed source, not even “the new” closed source. The following 2×2 matrix illustrates the distinction between license and process: