Category: 1.5 Commercial Open Source

In this talk, I explain the single-vendor open source business model (also: multi-licensing, open core) and in particular its intellectual property strategies. This is the slide deck of a previously posted video. The deck is also available as a PDF for download.

It is common to see members of the open source community at large bash companies that use an open core model to make money. I have always found that curious, because the open source community is not against making money, but many are against making money using this particular approach. Just why? In the open…

I’m at my Ph.D. student retreat, following the Open Core Summit, a commercial conference on the use of open source strategies by product vendors, on Twitter. From afar, it appears that the attack on the definition of open source has made it to the conference. This is regrettable, but possible because of a root problem…

I thought I’d illustrate how I’d solve the current licensing conundrum of single-vendor open source firms like MongoDB and Elastic using some graphics. In short: While open source application vendors can still dual-license, open source component vendors (like the companies just mentioned) need to triple-license to get the benefits of open source yet keep their…

As you may have noticed, the move away from approved open source licenses to commercial almost-like-open-source licenses by single-vendor-owned open source projects has created a lot of bad press for the vendors behind such software. I don’t really understand this, because for all that I can tell, a triple-licensing rather than just a dual-licensing approach…