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No discussion of this would be complete without referencing Spolsky's "Commoditize your Complements" blog post [1]. Open sourcing something is an act of commodi
by m12k 6y ago
No discussion of this would be complete without referencing Spolsky's "Commoditize your Complements" blog post [1]. Open sourcing something is an act of commoditization - and that's great for businesses to do if the thing they are commoditizing complements their core business. E.g. you sell consultancy around X, so you open source X (cf Magento, RHEL). But if what you actually sell is X, then open sourcing it is shooting yourself in the foot. And sadly, if what you're selling is 'deployment of X', then there's a risk AWS will just come along and sell the same thing - because they're in the business of commoditizing deployment. Basically if you want to build a business around an open source project, you need to figure out a business model where you get paid for some part of the equation that hasn't been commoditized yet. I really hope the OSS community figures that out, because I'd love for OSS development to be good business.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
- jka 6y agoSoftware quality assurance, features and support are important and viable avenues to monetize even the most openly-licensed project. All of those require motivated contributors, either from the community or from the developer's in-house team. What we might see play out here is competition over the market's perception of different distributions of the software, and attempts to build contributor communities that are able to back up each side's claims by supplying genuine value and improvements. Marketing and perception management have in recent history often been correlated somewhat with the size of each competitor's budget.