Continuing the ongoing discussion about open source software business models, Rich Sharples of Red Hat’s JBoss division weighs in on an issue I have with Savio Rodrigues’s categorization of open source users: namely the fact that it does not take into account the value of the application in question.

As Rich points out, Savio’s categorization assumes that a business acts the same way for all applications. “rarely have I identified an organization that would be easy to pigeon-hole into Category A or Category B (or C for that matter). What I have seen are many cases where an organization exhibits a Category A or Category B behaviour (and often both),” he writes.

Instead, Rich writes, the likelihood of a company paying for a support contract is based on its ability to support the application in house, and how risk adverse it is. Happily, he’s also drawn a nice diagram to illustrate his point (and who doesn’t like diagrams?).

Source: Rich Sharples.

I noted last week that the the more expertise a customer’s IT department has with it, the less likely a customer is to pay for a support subscription. As Rich’s digram indicates, this is only true when the risk associated with the application remains constant. As an application or deployment becomes more valuable to the company the likelihood of adopting a support agreement increases.

Additionally while the yellow self-support area is larger for open source projects than for proprietary products, Rich notes that “this area is largest when the technology under consideration is a) very stable; b) in widespread use” with an example being the Apache web server.

Which isn’t to say that there is no glass ceiling for open source vendors, but is to say that it is not necessarily a matter of features and functionality. Savio argues that open source vendors will hit a wall when they have “saturated Category C users (those with cash and willing to spend it to save time)”. I would argue that even the most successful open source vendors have only scratched the surface and have an opportunity to sell more valuable applications into Category C accounts.

Then again, as Rich points out with reference to the John Godfrey Saxe poem The Blind Men and the Elephant (I’ve mixed up my elephant references with the title by the way) we’re all feeling our way in the dark a bit here. It could be that we are all partly right but entirely wrong.