If the recent debate about open core licensing has proven one thing, it is that the issue of combining proprietary and open source code continues to be a controversial one. It ought to be simple: either the software meets the Open Source Definition or it does not. But it is not always easy to tell [...]

Last week at OSBC I attended an interesting discussion between Matt Asay and Gartner’s Brian Prentice, much of which was spent discussing the relative merits of open core and pure open source business strategies. Brian has written up his thoughts on the discussion, and I thought I would also add mine since there were a [...]

UPDATE An updated version of the business strategy framework can be found here. UPDATE Last week I presented “From support services to software services – the evolution of open source business strategies” at the OSBC event in San Francisco. The presentation was effectively a work in progress update on our research into the various strategies [...]

There’s been a fair amount of attention – both positive and negative – on dual licensing in recent weeks. A few days ago Brian Aker wrote: “The fact is, there are few, and growing fewer, opportunities to make money on dual licensing.” It is a sweeping statement, but one that is worth further consideration, especially [...]

Along with “community” one of the most widely used and misused terms in the world of free and open source software is “commercial”. Depending on who you are talking to, and the context in which they are talking, it could be used to mean proprietary software, or companies that are for-profit, or VC-backed, or make [...]

We’ve provided a few examples recently of vendors choosing permissive licenses for open source software projects with the express purpose of rapidly driving adoption of a particular technology (Day Software, JetBrains, SpringSource). The last of those was interesting as compared to SpringSource’s previous decision to use the GPL for the same project with the intention [...]

A couple of posts have been published recently worrying about the impact of more open source specialist vendors being acquired by proprietary vendors. This is an issue that crops up occasionally. Usually when a major acquisition has been announced, and the current questioning seems to be driven by the ongoing saga of Oracle-Sun-MySQL, as well [...]

Development tools vendor JetBrains caused something of a stir in October last year with the news that it was releasing an open source Community Edition of its popular IntelliJ Idea Java IDE using the Apache License. IntelliJ Idea 9 was duly released in both Ultimate Edition and Community Edition forms at the beginning of December, [...]

Since the European Commission announced it was opening an in-depth investigation into the proposed takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle with a focus on MySQL there has been no shortage of opinion written about Oracle’s impending ownership of MySQL and its impact on MySQL users and commercial partners, as well as MySQL’s business model, dual [...]

Matt Asay is right, in my opinion, to point out the inherent bias in the case Monty Widenius et al have made against Oracle’s potential ownership of MySQL. I would go further, however, in stating that the case being made against Oracle is flawed by the fact that it is so self-serving. For instance: I [...]

A number of people have recently raised the issue of the threat that cloud computing poses to the monetization of open source by specialist vendors, including Savio Rodrigues, Matt Asay, and Mike Hogan. I believe that cloud computing provides an opportunity for open source specialists, but agree that cloud services based on open source code [...]

Since the European Commission announced it was opening an in-depth investigation into the proposed takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle with a focus on MySQL there has been no shortage of opinion written about Oracle’s impending ownership of MySQL and its impact on MySQL users and commercial partners, as well as MySQL’s business model, dual [...]

Below is a rough draft of the cornerstone slide for a new presentation deck I am putting together to explain the various business strategies for monetizing open source software. The aim is to explain every single existing strategy using the elements on this one slide (although I am yet to test it out). In our [...]

I’ve written a few times recently about the fact that I think the open source engagement model practiced by companies such as Day Software will become more popular as we see an increasing number of proprietary companies engaging with open source and the pendulum appears to have swung back in favour of community-developed open source [...]

Since the European Commission announced it was opening an in-depth investigation into the proposed takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle with a focus on MySQL there has been no shortage of opinion written about Oracle’s impending ownership of MySQL and its impact on MySQL users and commercial partners, as well as MySQL’s business model, dual [...]

A controversial issue in the UK this week is the BBC’s decision to invite the British National Party – the far-right, whites-only political party – to appear on Question Time, the BBC’s flagship political debate programme. Critics fear that the move will legitimise the BNP’s far-right views, while the BBC has defended the invitation on [...]

There was some rapid reaction to my post arguing why open core vendors should consider opening up their core code, either under a more permissive license than the GPL, or (and perhaps and) to an independent foundation. The most interesting response, for me, came from Savio Rodrigues since he questioned whether the theory would work [...]

I recently suggested that open core vendors should consider releasing the source code for their core open source project under a more permissive license, or better still via an existing community/foundation. The idea has been the subject of some interesting conversation on Twitter this week, not least since Sun’s Simpn Phipps asked the very pertinent [...]

Simon Phipps has begun a conversation designed ultimately “to devise some sort of a Software Freedom Definition which articulates a holistic vision of software freedom against which businesses can be benchmarked.” To put it another way, this is an attempt to create a definition of “open source vendor”. We have discussed this issue before, and [...]

At the Open World Forum event in Paris this morning I presented a quick overview of the state of free and open source software in 2009 and a look at the trends shaping FOSS into the next decade. The presentation was just 10 minutes rather than the 20 I had originally understood it to be, [...]