Category: 1.5 Commercial Open Source
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Solving the Commercial Open Source Licensing Dilemma With Triple-Licensing
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…
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The Commercial Open Source Pledge
I’m pretty frustrated by some of the discussion around the recent relicensing decisions by commercial open source companies. A fair bit of it seems confused to me, and I think this is mostly due to commentators not understanding the purpose of community for the vendor. So I decided to write a hypothetical pledge for venture-capital…
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Market Segmentation in the Open Core Model
Life is exciting in commercial open source land. On Tuesday this week, another commercial open source vendor relicensed its product while at the same time disavowing the open core model, which they call a tiered approach to their business. This disavowel piqued my interest, not because the open core model is good or bad, but…
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From the Bag of Commercial Open Source Tricks: Paying for the Upgrade
On a recent trip to Montreal, I reconnected with Marc Laporte, leader of the WikiSuite project and an old friend and fellow wiki enthusiast. Naturally, we talked about open source business strategies and he pointed me to one way of how commercial open source companies make money: They don’t provide you with a free upgrade…
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Free-to-Use, Unless You Are a Cloud Provider (The New Strategy?)
On the heels of my talk about the current licensing challenges to single-vendor open source firms, I want to discuss the resulting strategy for vendors selling to developers. Single-vendor open source firms go to market by providing software they developed to the world under an open source license. The goal is to create a large…
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Why Now? And Who? The Struggle Over Single-Vendor / Open-Core Licensing
Update 2023-08-26: Redis writes to us that they rebranded from Redis Labs, to Redis. In yesterday’s talk I reviewed the current licensing struggle of single-vendor open source firms. Single-vendor open source firms go to market by providing software they developed for free, under an open source license, while also offering a commercially licensed version of…