Late last week Matt Asay argued that cloud computing is the natural conclusion of open source, writing that “while open-source entrepreneurs initially intended… services to mean support and consulting, the industry has taken open source to one logical conclusion and has crowned services as the only important software outcome” and that “the cloud takes open [...]

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 [...]

I mentioned in yesterday’s CAOS Links that Microsoft had published a white paper (PDF) on open source. Called “Participation in a World of Choice” it outlines Microsoft’s perspective on various issues related to open source development, distribution and licensing.
There is plenty for open source advocates to discuss and argue with (and Carlo Daffara has already [...]

George Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, has written an interesting post on the topic of defining what it means to be a Free Software vendor, furthering the conversation on business strategies related to free and open source software.
I have recently posted about defining what constitutes an “open source vendor” for our reports. [...]

How does IBM’s open source strategy compare to Sun’s? Or Microsoft’s? What’s the difference between MySQL’s strategy and JasperSoft’s? Are some strategies better suited to engaging with organic open source communities, rather than inorganic? What on earth is the Open Core model?
These are some the questions we hoped to try and address with our Open [...]

Last week Carlo Daffara published a preliminary new classification of open source business models to be used by Conecta, updating the original taxonomy used as part of the FLOSSMETRICS and OpenTTT efforts.
Although I examined that taxonomy as part of my research for Open Source is Not a Business Model (OSINABM) I also tried not to [...]

The debate about open source business models is too big to be contained on this blog and has spilled over onto The Open Book on BI where JasperSoft CEO Brian Gentile invited me to respond to his recent assertion that the Open Core model offers the best model for community and commercial success.
Rather than re-rash [...]

I mentioned last week that the debate about open source business strategies had reared its head again thanks to posts by Dave Rosenberg and Michael Coté (twice) - not to mention Matt Asay and Tarus Balog.
While I am at risk of repeating myself, there are a couple of points I wanted to make.
In our report, [...]

Savio Rodrigues picked up the ball and ran with it, furthering the discussion on what makes a vendor an “open source vendor”. I left a few comments to Savio’s post that I thought were worth repeating here.
First off, Savio altered my definition slightly to ensure that the likes of Google and Amazon could not be [...]

I received an email from Tarus Balog, CEO of OpenNMS Group, on Friday, taking issue with the language I had used to describe two open source vendors (and I use that term deliberately).
Essentially Tarus objected to me using the term “open source vendor” to describe two companies with Open Core licensing strategies. His email [...]

I wrote last week about the commercial open source business strategies that I expect to dominate in 2009.
The flipside to that is the commercial open source community strategy. You simply can’t have one without the other, and I expect community strategies will be a hot topic in 2009 and beyond.
Savio Rodrigues wrote recently that “By [...]

The future of commercial open source software lies in commercial licensing strategies, but which are the strategies that are more likely to deliver the results vendors are looking for?
Much of the open source blog chatter over the Christmas period was related to open source business models/strategies, largely triggered by a post written by Dave Rosenberg [...]

I was thinking of writing a round-up of the key open source agenda items in 2008 but then I got distracted putting together some graphics, so - two birds with one stone - here’s open source in 2008 in pictures:
(Some of these I’ve already written about, some of them I’ll write about next year. Apologies [...]

“When it comes to a proprietary software vendor with a distressed business model taking
advantage of open source as a last-ditch effort to stay afloat, we do not see open source as a panacea.”
That statement was made in our third CAOS report Going Open, published in February 2007, but is significant today given recent headlines about [...]

When Monty Widenius published his criticisms of MySQL 5.1 recently a lot of the coverage that followed focused on his belief that the product had been made generally available too early and has too many serious bugs.
A solution to this problem would have been told hold 5.1 back even longer for more testing or, better [...]

I wrote recently that the “five ages of vendor-led open source revenue strategies” I’d come up with wasn’t suitable for vendors that build a business around community-led projects.
I recently met up with Ian Skerrett, director of marketing at the Eclipse Foundation and while we were chatting about community engagement, amongst other things, he showed me [...]

In was trying to avoid getting involved in the discussion surrounding Stuart Cohen’s article Open Source: The Model Is Broken in BusinessWeek, but I just can’t help myself. There has been a lot of negative reaction to the article, most of which, in my view, is wide of the mark.
Stuart’s article basically makes the point [...]

Before I got waylaid with traveling I wrote that each of the various open source revenue strategies might have its place depending on the stage of commoditization and the short- and long-term goals of the individual vendor.
I was thinking it might be possible to describe the lifecycle of open source strategies, but I never got [...]

There is a really interesting thread over at Alfresco’s licensing forum that points to one of the central problems with dual licensing as an open source business strategy: it is potentially confusing, even for the employees of the company in question.
The thread deals with the questions of Jerico, a potential Alfresco partner over the licensing [...]

There’s been plenty of reaction this week to Sun’s restructuring announcement from last Friday. That announcement included the inevitable (cutting 15-18% of the workforce), the expected (organisational changes), and the surprising (the departure of Rich Green).
The conventional wisdom appears to be that Sun is positioning to sell off some of its less profitable product lines [...]