Category: 1. Software Industry
-
A Simple Model of the Organizational Support of Open Source Projects
I’m very much interested in the governance of open source projects, in particular if these are user-led projects. With this post, I’m proposing a basic terminology to talk about the formal organizational structure underlying the governance of such open source projects. As the following two lists show, there are only three basic situations. First, there…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Single-Vendor Open Source at the Crossroads (Slides) #lfosls
I’ll be giving a presentation on single-vendor open source today at the Linux Foundation Open Source Leadership Summit 2019. Abstract: Most venture capital funding in open source flows to single-vendor open source firms. With the struggles over licensing in the cloud, these companies find themselves at the crossroads: Stay true to open source or move…
-
Comments on the state of open source in Germany (in German)
A German trade magazine for IT professionals just published an article on the state of open source (in German). Yours truly and many others are featured in there, commenting (or lamenting) on how Germany needs to catch-up on open source, a propellant of digitization, as the author notes.
-
Too many points of failure (at Theranos)
I just finished reading John Carreyrou’s book Bad Blood, which presents the story of the rise and fall of one-time Silicon Valley unicorn Theranos through his eyes as the journalist who broke the story. In case you missed it: Theranos was a healthcare company promising to sell a machine that could perform quickly and reliably…