Last June I reported on James Dixon’s Bee Keeper model for understanding the relationships between commercial open source vendors and their communities.

Recently James has updated the model, incorporating a number of changes, including some suggested by me as a means by which the Bee Keeper analogy could be applied beyond captive open source projects.

I’m very grateful to James for taking my suggestions on board, as well as linking to our wider research on open source business strategies.

Irrespective of our inclusion in James’ paper I wanted to draw attention to the latest version (PDF) of the Bee Keeper as I believe James has done a great job of improving what was already a very elegant explanation of the development and business strategies adopted by commercial open source vendors.

In addition to the original Bee Keeper analogy (in short the vendor is the bee keeper; the community is the bees; the open source project is the honey; and the customer is after processed honey - supported open source software) James has added:

• The Wild Hive Model for Open Source Projects
• The Maple Syrup Farm Model for Proprietary Software Companies
• The Honey-Gatherer Model for Service/Support Commercial Open Source

The inclusion of the first two of these models is a significant improvement, I believe, in providing a context for understanding the motivations of commercial open source vendors in taking the Bee Keeper approach. I’ll leave it to others to comment on James’ wisdom in incorporating the third, as that was my suggestion.

One suggestion I made that didn’t make the cut was that of the blender model for service and certification providers that do the equivalent of “pick and choose honey from a variety of freely available bee nests and blend it together to produce a more palatable product”.

David Dennis of GroundWork has, completely independently, suggested the Honey Blender as an additional model for vendors, applying the same terms to vendors like GroundWork and Linux distributors that combine code from multiple projects (both wild and domesticated).

Reading David’s suggestion I would agree that the ‘blender’ tag is better applied to vendors that adopt this hybrid production model rather than service and certification providers, which are arguably covered by the Honey-Gatherer model.

In the comments to David’s post, James notes that “I have not included it to date because most enterprise proprietary vendors do the same thing” which I took to mean that most proprietary vendors combine open source code within their own to produce their proprietary products.

This is true, and points to the major model that I believe is missing from the latest version of the Bee Keeper - the use of open source by proprietary vendors in their development processes. I previously suggested the concept of “the brewer” - a vendor that takes honey from various sources and turns it into a completely different product (in this case, mead).

That particular analogy is not the greatest to be honest, and does not take into account the variety of ways in which open source software can be used in the development of proprietary products but I believe there is some scope for expanding the Bee Keeper model further, both for completeness, and to make the distinction with the 100% proprietary “The Maple Syrup Farm Model”.

Through our ongoing research we are engaged in examining the strategies of traditional proprietary vendors in engaging with and making use of open source, so I shall put some more thought into how our observations can be applied to the Bee Keeper model.

Given the variety of possible approaches to using open source software in the development of proprietary products it is feasible that such a model belongs in a related but entirely separate paper.

In the meantime, I fully recommend you take a look at the latest draft of The Bee Keeper and follow James’ blog for further updates.