(Or “freedom of speech won’t feed my children”)
Last month I noted that Matt Asay, one of the highest profile proponents of open source software, had changed his position on the use of proprietary extensions as a means of attracting paying customers to software based on open source code.
Having previously advocated a 100% open source approach, [...]

Matt Asay has continued his public conversion to the merits of proprietary extensions/value-add services with the publication of a new post in which he argues that the Open-Core Licensing model is not just good for business but also good for community-relations.
“It’s actually quite difficult to distribute a 100 percent open-source product and monetize [...]

JasperSoft’s business development director Andrew Lampitt has kicked off his new blog with an interesting post related to business models used by open source-related vendors.
In it he attempts to define the approach utilized by the likes of JasperSoft and SugarCRM, which offer open source products with core functionality, as well as commercial extensions. The [...]

The effects of global warming must be worse than were first thought. Matt Asay has admitted that it makes sense for software vendors to charge upfront license fees.
While I am being facetious, the recent post from Matt - titled “the problem with open-source revenue models” - is an interesting insight into the fact that open [...]

A couple of articles have been published recently that point to a growing realisation/admission about the role that open source will play in the future of enterprise software.
In “The Commercial Bear Hug of Open Source” Dan Woods details the various methods by which open source has become increasingly commercial in recent years, while in “The [...]

Larry Dignan reports on a coming revolution in software support and maintenance contracts, prompted by Dennis Howlett’s excellent analysis of why the reliance of enterprise software vendors on maintenance revenue is unsustainable.
Noting the negative response to recent price rises from Oracle and SAP, Dennis maintains that increasing maintenance costs is unsustainable as it reduces [...]

A classic Morecambe and Wise comedy sketch from the 1970s sees Andre Previn criticizing Eric for playing all the wrong notes while attempting the Greig Piano Concerto. Morecambe responds that he is in fact “playing all the right notes. But not necessarily in the right order.”
I was reminded of the sketch this morning while reading [...]

I was in San Francisco at the tail-end of last week and was fortunate to have some time to meet up with Josh Berkus, a member of the PostgreSQL core team and, until recently, a Sun employee.
Our conversation covered a lot of ground, including his reasons for leaving Sun (he didn’t go into detail but [...]

There are certain phrases that we tend to hear a lot from vendors — ‘enterprise-class, best of breed, customer choice,’ etc. However, I was repeatedly hearing somewhat surprising phrases as I made the rounds at LinuxWorld this year: ‘We don’t care, customers don’t care, no one cares …”
Don’t get me wrong. Linux and open source [...]

At the OSI blog Andrew C Oliver discusses the potential for the OSI to “develop standards beyond the current license-centric set of standards known as the ‘Open Source Definition‘” with which to judge the business models of open source vendors.
He was responding to this post from Michael DeHaan that defines a list of the principles [...]

Two interesting posts on the subject of vendor and community open source development have been published today by Stephen O’Grady and Matt Asay. First Stephen called for the rhetoric to be toned down and for participants in the ongoing debate to avoid claiming that one governance model is “better” than the other.
“Organic projects might generate [...]

It seems almost churlish to wonder whether Google could be even more successful than it already is with a different strategy, but the company’s approach to open source and open development has come into focus in recent weeks.
On last week’s podcast we discussed whether the company should see the AGPL as more of an opportunity [...]

James Dixon has given the thumbs-up to my stretching his Bee Keeper analogy to explain open source development models (which is nice) and in doing so has suggested a new term to help quickly explain the difference between vendor- and community- dominated development projects.
The debate about the difference between the two approaches, and the language [...]

I’ve been reading The Bee Keeper (also here in PDF), an explanation of the relationship between professional open source software (POSS) vendors and their communities, written by Pentaho’s CTO James Dixon. It is a very elegant explanation of the development/business model employed by the POSS vendors such as MySQL, Pentaho, JBoss and Alfresco.
James uses [...]

Mobile open source player Funambol is certainly giving us plenty to watch these days with its Affero GPL licensing, its use of ad-supported mobile phone access to email and general bet on mobile open source software. Like an audience watching the tightrope act, we’re observing intently (Funambol translates from the Latin words funis (rope) and [...]

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 [...]

Last week I asked whether open source vendors face a glass ceiling, prompted by Savio Rodrigues’s suggestion that a pure open source support model will only get vendors so far.
While I remain unconvinced at this stage* Savio is in no doubt that such a ceiling exists and has continued his argument with a suggestion as [...]

Savio Rodrigues has published an interesting post about the adoption of commercial open source software that brings together his thoughts about open source business models and suggests that commercial open source vendors may be heading for a glass ceiling.
As Savio puts it: “OSS lowers marketing, distribution, and sales costs. And yes, OSS is a great [...]

EnterpriseDB’s new CEO, Ed Boyajian, is planning on using his experience of growing enterprise adoption of open source software projects at Red Hat to take EnterpriseDB to the next level. The company announced today that Boyajian is taking over from Andy Astor, who becomes executive vice president of business development.
Boyajian was previously vice president [...]

“How do enterprises learn about open source alternatives?” was the first question posed on CIO.com’s Executives Online blogathon. A surprising number of respondents listed Google as the first port of call.

For example, Chris Keene wrote: “Here is a simple test. If you are looking for a technical solution - for example a visual ajax tool [...]