Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Category: 1.5 Commercial Open Source

  • The Intellectual Property Rights Imperative of Single-Vendor Open Source

    I guess everybody knows it but nobody ever named it, as far as I know, so I’m doing it here: The Intellectual Property Rights Imperative of Single-Vendor Commercial Open Source Always act in such a way that you, and only you, possess the right to provide the open source project under a license of your…

  • Every License has its Time and Place

    You may have noticed the recent discussion about which open source license a single-vendor commercial open source firm should choose for its community offering. In this blog post I’ll argue that this choice depends on the state and speed of the firm.

  • Commercial Open Source: The Naming Confusion Remains

    In 2004, SugarCRM coined the term “commercial open source“. This term was intend to separate the commercially-oriented open source projects of venture-capital-backed startups from the then dominant community open source projects. The term was picked up quickly, by many. I (as well as others) define it the following way: “A commercial open source firm is…

  • Commercial Open Source Paper Appears in LNBIP 36

    My AMCIS 2009 paper on the Commercial Open Source Business Model will be republished in an LNBIP (Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing) issue by Springer-Verlag. The reference is: Dirk Riehle. “The Commercial Open Source Business Model.” In Value Creation in e-Business Management, LNBIP 36. Edited by M.L. Nelson et al. Springer-Verlag, 2009. Page 18–30.…

  • Commercial Open Source: Faster, Better, Cheaper, and More Easily?

    I’m trying to create a pithy statement as to how commercial open source firms are superior to traditional (closed source) software development firms. For that, I need to define what the specific effects are that using an open source go-to-market strategy has on the bottom line. (If your answer is “it’s the community, naturally”—that’s not…

  • The Commercial Open Source Business Model [AMCIS 2009]

    Abstract: Commercial open source software projects are open source software projects that are owned by a single firm that derives a direct and significant revenue stream from the software. Commercial open source at first glance represents an economic paradox: How can a firm earn money if it is making its product available for free as…