One of the topics that cropped up at the Open Source Think Tank and also at an event in London yesterday was the idea that the concept of services needs to evolve to maximize the potential returns for open source service providers (both supporting single and multiple packages). Perhaps this focus on the product has distracted attention from the creation of more innovative approaches to services.

I think you’ve done a great job of delineating the issues, and of course only time will tell which position will be best for which companies. I’d just like to add one thing which became clear to me as I discussed this topic with other delegates to the Open World Forum: it may be that a successful service-based open source company depends on an aspect of scale, diversity, and complexity. That is to say it may be quite difficult for a thousand such companies to ever make any money each supporting one single package, but it is possible for a single company to make quite a bit of money supporting a thousand packages.

So many entrepreneurs have it drilled into their heads that they need to focus on some narrow slice of the market, demonstrate dominance there, and only then expand. These entrepreneurs who have staked out narrow territories, be it content management, CRM, database, etc., are finding that in the real world such focus is contraindicated.

I think that the radical success of open source companies can better found by understanding how to deliver the appearance of simplicity to complex problems via services rather than trying to build and sell piece parts that may become more or less valuable with proprietary widgets around them.