Comments on: Dual of denial, on the success and failure of dual licensing

By: 451 CAOS Theory » Winning and losing with open core

451 CAOS Theory » Winning and losing with open core — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:32:42 +0000

[...] in 2010 30% are now open core, 18% single open source, and just 5% dual licensing (which put some previous discussion into [...]

By: Marten Mickos

Marten Mickos — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 07:45:22 +0000

Matt,

Right, for that you may not need proprietary extensions.

I am not sure however that all vendors would publish such software under a FOSS license, so in that sense the access as a service could essentially amount to a proprietary extension anyhow.

///mgm

By: Matthew Aslett

Matthew Aslett — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 07:12:15 +0000

Marten,

If you are selling access as a service to paying customers, do you need the proprietary extensions to drive revenue? Depends on the volume of users I guess.

Matt

By: Links 1/3/2010: New Linux Benchmarks ARM Development Studio for Linux | Boycott Novell

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:06:16 +0000

[...] Dual of denial – on the success and failure of dual licensing A good example of this is OpenNMS Group. The acquisition of copyright to the 1.0 code base in 2009 out the company in the position of being able to changing its licensing strategy beyong a pure open source approach. While the company is unlikely to go open core (Tarus Balog prefers to call it “fauxpen source”, OpenNMS has delivered Powered by OpenNMS – a commercial license program: [...]

By: Marten Mickos

Marten Mickos — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:09:59 +0000

Matt,

I’d think open core would *grow* because of SaaS and cloud.

Where Ghostscript, Sleepycat, MySQL and others picked dual licensing about 10 years ago because it made perfect sense at the time, I would expect the new generation of open source companies to pick open core in today’s market. How would they otherwise make money?

///mgm

By: Matthew Aslett

Matthew Aslett — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 16:59:56 +0000

Thanks Marten. That makes sense. We have noted that with SaaS/cloud delivery the need for dual and/or open core approaches diminishes.

Matt

By: Marten Mickos

Marten Mickos — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 16:46:32 +0000

Matt,

Thanks for the write-up. To me, the plateauing (or perhaps even decrease) of dual licensing is primarily a result of changing market conditions.

Dual licensing works where companies distribute derivative works (the principle of the two D:s). With web2.0, SaaS and cloud computing growing the fastest, there is much less need among companies to distribute derivative works. Hence it is less attractive for vendors to offer products under such a model.

Marten