Category: 1.5 Commercial Open Source

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? Please note that I’m asking about single-vendor open source…

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…

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.

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…

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…