A presentation at OpenFest Bulgaria 2019 in in Sofia, Bulgaria by Emanuil Tolev
Open Source as a Business Strategy, Struggle & Success Emanuil Tolev @emanuil_tolev Based on the work of Philipp Krenn, @xeraa @emanuil_tolev @elastic How do you build a lasting and successful company that also stays true to its open source roots? This talk takes a look at why open source is important to business and three essential elements of this path: * Strategy: How can you monetize your open source product? Is it support, an open core approach, cloud services, or a combination of the three? And which ones are the features you can even commercialize without alienating your community? * Struggle: “You received a 100 million dollars in venture capital and yet you have so many open issues?!” Once money is involved the dynamics often change. How can you manage expectations and still build on a flourishing open source community? * Success: How do you balance open source and commercial success? How do you align engineering and sales decisions? This talk takes the perspective of Elastic, the company behind the open source products Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash, which makes its money with support, the commercial X-Pack extensions, and cloud offerings. But we are also taking a look at how others are approaching this challenge, what worked, and what failed.
[…] allow software to be freely used, modified, and shared. https://opensource.org/licenses @emanuil_tolev @elastic Before getting started: What even is open source? This is one widely used definition. And it is based on the DFSG, which is one of the oldest definitions in this space.
Four Freedoms: Use, Study, Share, Improve https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/basics/ 4freedoms.en.html @emanuil_tolev @elastic Free software focusses on user freedom, OS on technical and business aspects
What is Business? @emanuil_tolev @elastic Wait, what? ^ Value generation and Value capture. ^ Inside capture we have Value proposition and clear communication. Most of the effectiveness of sales is clearly communicating value prop, not sleazy pressure tactics.
! @emanuil_tolev @elastic Imagine I make a cake. This is value generation, I think we all agree. ^ I will give you this cake in exchange for 5 EUR. Value prop, clear communication. This is sales, that’s it, nothing more to it. Maybe a bit more. ^ It’s a juicy cake, not dry like most shops’. Its smell reminds you of your grandmother’s cake. Of songs whose lyrics you no longer remember. Of cold autumn mornings and warm summer evenings. Of the smell of your favourite childhood book, the one you read again and again, so often with cake and a glass of milk. ^ You can buy this nostalgic unachievable shadow of your childhood for 12 EUR! This is marketing. ^ The question in open source is, who sells the cake you make. Who captures value. A big part of that is who gets to market it and who does that better.
Who is using OSS? @emanuil_tolev @elastic
Who is opening issues? @emanuil_tolev @elastic
Who is contributing back? @emanuil_tolev @elastic
Who is making money from the project? @emanuil_tolev @elastic
https://twitter.com/ geowolf/status/ 971811346823221248 describe - room full, enthusiasm lost, room empty
Ninety-eight-point-five percent of the code ever put into the core of Puppet was put in there by somebody I paid. Luke Kaines (founder of Puppet), https://www.geekwire.com/2018/might-time-bigcloud-share-wealth-open-source-startups/ @emanuil_tolev @elastic If you want to get paid, and most of us need to get paid at some point, money is an important part of the open source ecosystem.
Open Source ≠ Business Model @emanuil_tolev @elastic Arguably better than closed source in every way except for making money. So you need a strategy to make money
Open source is a distribution model that allows us to build community. It’s a force multiplier. Shay Banon, Elastic @emanuil_tolev @elastic Shay is an engineer, he wrote the original Elasticsearch project and created the company around it, leading it from nothing to a 7B valuation company on the public financial markets. ^ Seems odd to put it like that, but this is partly what you’ll need to think about. You no longer have just a hobby where you do whatever you feel like - you can still mostly follow your heart, but now there are consequences. No adoption = oblivion.
@emanuil_tolev @elastic Datomic, the datastore close to Clojure never really took off. Partially probably because it’s not open source and adoption was always hampered. But they have a lot of interesting features like transactions, chronologies, AWS as a first class citizen (metered pricing),…
Community Advocate @emanuil_tolev @elastic
The vast majority of the code in all of these is open source, and you’ve probably heard of them. ^ We’re nearly 2’000 people so the q is how do you pay salaries from .. those projects.
Interesting that they started trying to integrate even more things once they went public.
@emanuil_tolev @elastic ES is pretty widely used. In the background of any of these is ES and has been for many years at this point.
!”# Where is the ? @emanuil_tolev Where is the money? @elastic
Community vs Company @emanuil_tolev @elastic Warning, some people see them as very separate. It’s not how Elastic thinks about it. There is some merit to Elastic’s position here since no-one else would pay so well for dozens of people to work on Lucene and ES, much less Kibana. But it’s a particular PoV, and you should keep that in mind.
Agenda Strategy Struggle Success @emanuil_tolev @elastic
Strategy @emanuil_tolev @elastic
Services Support, Consulting, Training, Certification @emanuil_tolev @elastic Those who build it know it best, so why not get support and services from them Early open source business model (from Red Hat); often considered a losing proposition today
@emanuil_tolev @elastic Use for free but the ability to call support. Commercial support and related services for Ubuntu and related projects
@emanuil_tolev @elastic Red Hat Enterprise Linux: Support, testing & stability Source code available, but strict trademark rules. Third-party derivatives can be built and redistributed, eg CentOS Slightly old data now but the point is clear.
https://investors.redhat.com/~/media/Files/R/Red-Hat-IR/documents/q418-fact-sheet.pdf
too easy to use, nobody wants to pay you?
Support Problem Ease of Use @emanuil_tolev @elastic What if your product is too easy to use? Make it worse to survive financially?
Support Problem Renewal Rates @emanuil_tolev @elastic After 1 or 2 years the customer often knows the product. Also if there were no major problems — wrong incentives ^ Lose a third of your revenue every year.
Consulting & Training Problem Service-Only Competition @emanuil_tolev @elastic Just start a consulting company directly. More competitive with more billable hours. They are cheaper than you - they only do the consulting, not the R&D. If you’re 40% more expensive .. no.
Red Hat has a unique business model crafted in the late 90’s/early 00’s when open source lived in a much stronger ideological environment. Sacha Labourey (Hudson / Jenkins / CloudBees), https://medium.com/ @sachalabourey/ibm-acquires-red-hat-where-is-google-b2fe186ccfe4 @emanuil_tolev @elastic A lot of revenue, but ultimately much slower growth than other companies capturing some of the value in infrastructure. And value capture is pretty important. ^ Another factor might also be the history of Red Hat. But some are trying this again now:
https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/15/suse-is-once-again-an-independent-company/ @emanuil_tolev @elastic Independent company as of 2019/03 again ^ Has been passed around a lot. ^ Similar model to Red Hat. Very stable, has grown a lot, rides on the wave of things like Cloud Foundry, Open Stack and Kubernetes.
Open Core @emanuil_tolev @elastic This is conflating dual licenses, open core, open platform, closed source distributions Commercial add-ons, often around security, production tooling, monitoring,… Many examples: MongoDB, DataStax, Databricks, RedisLabs, Pivotal (Cloud Foundry), Hashicorp, Docker, Confluent,…
@emanuil_tolev @elastic Classic dual license example: GPLv2 and commercial (embed in commercial product, distribute a commercial modification) But also commercial features now
@emanuil_tolev @elastic Neo4j Enterprise consists of modules from Neo4j Community Edition [GPLv3] and other closed source components not present in this repository.
You are the treadmill.
Problem Competing Tools @emanuil_tolev @elastic Monitoring is a wide field — your tools will need to compete with everybody else For some problems someone might just build what you are trying to monetize
Problem Less Open, More Commercial @emanuil_tolev @elastic You need to make to more and more money, so there is a good chance that your open source side will suffer
Problem Cloud Providers @emanuil_tolev @elastic If AWS runs your project, they are covering security, monitoring,… for you — maybe badly but not your direct problem any more
Cloud Service @emanuil_tolev @elastic Even if software is completely open, many customers want to pay for a solution that “just works” and has a defined SLA with 24/7 monitoring and support. Customers pay for the operational expertise that comes from deeply understanding and running the software Even better if the software is not disk/CPU/ network intensive which boosts margins
@emanuil_tolev @elastic https:// core.trac.wordpress.org GPLv2 https://automattic.com: https://wordpress.com
@emanuil_tolev @elastic https://github.com/getsentry/sentry BSD-3-Clause https://sentry.io ^ aggregating traces like 150 times same error ^ ppl don’t want to run this, they want to use it
Making the cake but beware of stealing it when you want to eat it at last
Problem Cloud Providers @emanuil_tolev @elastic Anybody can start a similar service; especially AWS, Azure, GCP can easily capture big market segments
With the advent of the public cloud, pure open source models are very hard to defend. Sacha Labourey (Hudson / Jenkins / CloudBees), https://medium.com/ @sachalabourey/ibm-acquires-red-hat-where-is-google-b2fe186ccfe4 @emanuil_tolev @elastic
Cost in the Cloud @emanuil_tolev @elastic
The intent of open source software was not so that someone else can take the exact same software and offer it as a service. Salil Deshpande (Bain Capital), https://www.geekwire.com/2018/might-time-bigcloud-share-wealth-open-source-startups/ @emanuil_tolev @elastic He’s right, we think of collaboration rather than what’s happened. There is growing collaboration but a lot of engineers on the projects and in the open source companies think it’s seriously lacking. Maybe that will change. ^ He has also kind of conflated open source and source available licensing, which actually highlights a problem with VCs. This guy is not emotionally invested into open source. Whether you should be emotionally invested is a separate story, but he isn’t, and he doesn’t see it the same way most of you would see it.
Partnerships @emanuil_tolev @elastic
@emanuil_tolev @elastic Yahoo paid Mozilla $375 million in 2015, and is obligated for the same amount each year through 2019 under a five-year contract for making the search provider Firefox’s default in the U.S.
Problem Domain Specific @emanuil_tolev @elastic Some partnership deal, but hard for most software projects
Donations @emanuil_tolev @elastic SourceForge (anybody remembering?) supported donations for software projects Vue.js is funded through Patreon: https://github.com/ open-source/stories/yyx990803
OpenCollective @emanuil_tolev @elastic OpenCollective is a project to “provide the tools to raise money and share your finances in full transparency.”. One of their tools shows donation requests after installing a package as a dependency, asking developers to donate money to a particular project.
@emanuil_tolev @elastic https://wikimediafoundation.org/ wiki/Fundraising_reports: 2016/17 $91 million from 6.1 million donations Nobody got that working yet on a larger scale for software. Also it is very hard to plan
Problem Scaling & Planning @emanuil_tolev @elastic
For Patreon/donations to be a viable business model, have to put in just as much work as you’d have to do selling services/product, likely ending up w less from donations You can point to donation models that had it easy & I can point to traditional businesses that got lucky too Stephanie Hurlburt (Entrepreneur, Founder), https://twitter.com/sehurlburt/ status/1036091578060656640 @emanuil_tolev @elastic
Certified Partners @emanuil_tolev @elastic Paying to be a certified and authorized partner to provide services
@emanuil_tolev @elastic https://moodle.com/partners/
Problem Requires Commercial Ecosystem @emanuil_tolev @elastic
Ads @emanuil_tolev @elastic Ads in your docs are an idea, but probably not too well accepted and successful. Ads will only work in certain cases
@emanuil_tolev @elastic Adblock Plus (GPLv3): “Acceptable Ads” program for Google AdWords,… https://adblockplus.org/acceptableads: “Larger entities pay a licensing fee for the whitelisting services requested and provided to them (around 90 percent of the licences are granted for free)”
npm install funding @emanuil_tolev @elastic https://www.zdnet.com/article/popularjavascript-library-starts-showing-ads-in-itsterminal/ ^ There are those who think this is a good way to raise funds for crucial open-source projects that have always had a hard time financing themselves, and there are those who absolutely loathe the idea of seeing ads in their terminals.
Problem What Is (the Price to Be) Acceptable @emanuil_tolev Or what is the price to be acceptable @elastic
Merchandise @emanuil_tolev @elastic Sell branded products and get some % for that
@emanuil_tolev https:// www.openbsdstore.com @elastic
Problem Revenue @emanuil_tolev @elastic
Bounty / Crowdfunding @emanuil_tolev @elastic Bounties: Pay for specific feature to be added Crowdfunding (reverse bounty model): Offer writing software for money — Kickstarter / Indiegogo
Game “Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead”, Creative Commons, around $9,500 on Kickstarter 2013
@emanuil_tolev @elastic VueJS, Evan You working full time thanks to Patreon
Problem Vision & Maintainablility @emanuil_tolev @elastic Driving the product in the wrong direction and killing it by the high maintenance cost of one time changes. Works for bugfixes though
Corporate Sponsoring @emanuil_tolev @elastic Can be GSoC or various other things to give back, recruit, but sometimes also to white wash
Problem Incentives @emanuil_tolev @elastic
Struggle @emanuil_tolev @elastic
Philosophy @emanuil_tolev @elastic
If you are claiming your startup/company is open source and you aren’t contributing to some form of upstream… then you aren’t really. Sorry not sorry. Jessie Frazelle (Keyser Söze of containers), https://twitter.com/jessfraz/ status/954802380125736961 @emanuil_tolev @elastic We are heavily contributing back to Apache Lucene 2017: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-7738, https:// issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-7392, https:// issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-7982, https:// issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-7579, https://issues.apache.org/ jira/browse/LUCENE-7638, https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ LUCENE-8011, https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-7304, https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-7643, https:// issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-7407, https://issues.apache.org/ jira/browse/LUCENE-8068, https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ LUCENE-6278, https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-7609, https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-7963 Keyser Söze from the movie “The Usual Suspects” pulling the strings in the background
Makers Users Takers @emanuil_tolev @elastic There are 3 groups: the ones who contribute back (great), the ones who are using it (also great), and the ones who are actively consuming your ressources (not great)
The difference between Makers and Takers is not always 100% clear, but as a rule of thumb, Makers directly invest in growing both their business and the Open Source project. Takers are solely focused on growing their business and let others take care of the Open Source project they rely on. https://dri.es/balancing-makers-and-takers-to-scale-and-sustain-open-source @emanuil_tolev @elastic Organizations can be both Takers and Makers at the same time. For example, Acquia, my company, is a Maker of Drupal, but a Taker of Varnish Cache. We use Varnish Cache extensively but we don’t contribute to its development.
https://dri.es/balancing-makers-and-takers-to-scale-and-sustain-open-source
[…] Amazon, on one hand, bashes the open source ecosystem and highlights the advantage of its own tools, while at the same time taking projects like Presto, which was developed in the open by Facebook, and turning it into a packaged, revenue-generating product (the newly announced Athena service). https://dzone.com/articles/did-amazon-just-kill-open-source @emanuil_tolev @elastic
[…] If you are MSFT and I ask you if you’ve used Redis and you say “you mean Azure Redis Cache?”, that’s not a good sign. https://twitter.com/jensenharris/status/984268950136537088 @emanuil_tolev @elastic Or “Amazon ElastiCache for Redis”
@emanuil_tolev @elastic Speaking of Redis: Who saw the recent drama?
RedisLabs Modules: AGPL RediSearch, Redis Graph, ReJSON, ReBloom, Redis-ML @emanuil_tolev RedisLabs is employing Salvatore by the way @elastic
Apache 2 modified with Commons Clause (2018/08) @emanuil_tolev @elastic What is this Commons Clause thing? Open source: no AGPL: not stopping you, you only need to open changes
Without limiting other conditions in the License, the grant of rights under the License will not include, and the License does not grant to you, the right to Sell the Software. https://commonsclause.com @emanuil_tolev @elastic You can agree or disagree with the intention
Confusion CC Apache 2 modified with Commons Clause https://commons.apache.org @emanuil_tolev @elastic CC is very confusing with Creative Commons and also the Apache Commons library. Bolting a limitation on top of another license is even worse (and makes your software not open source any more)
Some rabid open-source wonks accused Redis Labs of trying to trick the community into thinking that modules were open source, because they used the word “Apache.” https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/07/commons-clause-stops-open-source-abuse/ @emanuil_tolev @elastic Don’t do this as the VC fund behind this
Be aware that the debate starting up about the Common Clause license due to Redis Labs adopting it will likely be heavily tainted by large corporations who have a lot of free labor to lose suddenly pretending to be huge champions of free software ideals. https://twitter.com/taotetek/status/1032248562116186112 @emanuil_tolev @elastic But also be mindful of reactions from cloud providers
[Maintainers] have a responsibility to ensure that the primary open source distribution remains open and free of proprietary code so that the community can build on the project freely, and the distribution does not advantage any one company over another. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-open-open-distrofor-elasticsearch/ @emanuil_tolev How convenient @elastic
Redis: BSD “Redis will remain BSD licensed” http://antirez.com/news/120 “Redis is not “open core” http://antirez.com/news/121 @emanuil_tolev @elastic It is and will be BSD licensed For Salvatore it’s not open core, because they only add things that are just not supposed to be in core Redis and he won’t do
RedisLabs Modules: Redis Source Available License (2019/03) @emanuil_tolev @elastic
https://redislabs.com/community/licenses/
@emanuil_tolev @elastic Late to the cloud game, but only small cloud providers. https:// www.mongodb.com/cloud/atlas on AWS, GCP, Azure Probably part of the reason: https:// www.mongodb.com/blog/post/theagpl
AGPL Server / Apache Clients Server Side Public License (2018/10) @emanuil_tolev @elastic
“13. Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License.” “13. Offering the Program as a Service.” https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license @emanuil_tolev @elastic
More than Reciprocal Permissive vs Copyleft vs SSPL @emanuil_tolev @elastic Copyleft: reciprocal or protective whereas other licenses are permissive. SSPL tries to bring the AGPL idea to cloud services IMO
https://www.percona.com/blog/2018/10/24/poll-mongodb-license-change/ @emanuil_tolev @elastic X% More Paying Customers for Y% Fewer Users?
Timing Effective Today @emanuil_tolev @elastic This is an issue. Non standard license needs to be analyzed, which might take months. In the meantime you can’t even use patch level releases
Clones Amazon DocumentDB @emanuil_tolev @elastic But your product could get replaced entirely, for example Cosmos DB offers a (mostly) compatible API for MongoDB, but also SQL, Cassandra, Graph (Gremlin) A lot of interesting aspects: Global distribution, availability & latency guarantees,…
[…] we are hereby withdrawing the SSPL from OSI consideration. http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2019March/003989.html @emanuil_tolev @elastic
@emanuil_tolev @elastic
For purposes of this Agreement, “Excluded Purpose” means making available any softwareas-a-service, platform-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service or other similar online service that competes with Confluent products or services that provide the Software. https://www.confluent.io/confluent-community-license @emanuil_tolev @elastic
https://www.confluent.io/blog/license-changes-confluent-platform
Money @emanuil_tolev @elastic
Conflict of Interest Open Source vs Commercial View @emanuil_tolev @elastic
@emanuil_tolev @elastic Rather ugly divorce, but there were always the problems of a single organization driving the project, hosting the docs, doing the client,…
In case you needed proof, @zdatainc just released a #benchmark report where #DataStax6 outperforms #OpenSource #cassandra http:// bit.ly/2txOvWl #databases #data https://twitter.com/DataStax/status/1012380187886055424 @emanuil_tolev @elastic Not much love left. Also if two are fighting sometimes a third one takes over
@emanuil_tolev @elastic Though it’s a faster (?) C++ reimplementation, so there are definitely also other reasons. But the Cassandra ecosystem is weirdly fragmented now with ScyllaDB being AGPL licensed and its core engine Seastar Apache
Venture Capital Accelerated Development vs Calling the Shots @emanuil_tolev @elastic Take external money or not? And what does that mean for your project?
http://oss.cash @emanuil_tolev @elastic
@emanuil_tolev @elastic Apache CouchDB is community driven, but they were too slow to capture the market and were overtaken left and right by others — most importantly by MongoDB and their brother Couchbase. There were other issues with Damian Katz leaving the organization in a bad way, but part of the problem probably was funding and how quickly they could iterate. Funnily enough CouchDB is very open and Couchbase is pretty closed (not a meaningful open source distribution)
Development Hobbled Product vs Starving Company @emanuil_tolev @elastic Setting the bar too low and crippling your open source product or dieing as a company Also the timing is delicate: Hobbling growth vs never finding a sustainable business model
@emanuil_tolev @elastic InfluxDB: Anything related to high availability or scale out clustering is kept as a closed source commercial product. Pretty hard change at some point, now more niche. RethinkDB: Much loved product, but the company went out of bussiness - too little and too late
@emanuil_tolev @elastic Still floating on VC, but how long?
Tricks Open Source but… @emanuil_tolev @elastic
@emanuil_tolev @elastic Public domain, so even stronger than open source. But doesn’t accept PRs: “Open-Source, not Open-Contribution” However, the tests are not open thus nobody can easily fork and commercialize it.
Success @emanuil_tolev @elastic This is also the conclusion
Business Is Optional @emanuil_tolev @elastic I’m not arguing that success means making a business out of an open source project
@emanuil_tolev @elastic For example PostgreSQL is an awesome open source project without any company directly behind it
Sometimes the odds are just not great for it and you enjoy the technical challenge more than the business one https://medium.com/@mattklein123/ optimizing-impact-why-i-will-notstart-an-envoy-platformcompany-8904286658cb
Business Is Complicated @emanuil_tolev @elastic
It saddens me that closed source companies are acclaimed for merely putting a piece of code on GitHub, while commercial open source companies get the worse shit for any action that involves protecting their work. Arnaud Porterie (former Docker engine lead), https://twitter.com/icecrime/status/1032155227368185856 @emanuil_tolev There also a lot of double standards at play here @elastic
Time for an Updated Model? @emanuil_tolev @elastic
MongoDB seeks to do what the FSF failed to do in 2007: close the “ASP loophole.” That is, to make the GPL (and open source) more relevant to the cloud era by ensuring those that modify and distribute open source as a cloud service contribute back. Matt Asay (former MongoDB VP of Community), https://twitter.com/mjasay/status/1052191818937327616 @emanuil_tolev @elastic There is merit to this idea, but there are also problems
@emanuil_tolev @elastic
Today, we’re adopting an extremely permissive version of the Business Source License (BSL). CockroachDB users can scale CockroachDB to any number of nodes. They can use CockroachDB or embed it in their applications (whether they ship those applications to customers or run them as a service). They can even run it as a service internally. The one and only thing that you cannot do is offer a commercial version of CockroachDB as a service without buying a license. https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/oss-relicensing-cockroachdb/ @emanuil_tolev @elastic MariaDBʼs Business Source License (BSL) 1.1 has the provisions we want and has already been endorsed by OSI founder Bruce Perens. The BSL is a parameterized license, so our use of it is not exactly the same as MariaDBʼs. The key difference is in the “Additional Use Grant”: MariaDBʼs MaxScale product, for example, allows you to use MaxScale with up to three server instances. CockroachDBʼs Additional Use Grant allows you to use CockroachDB with as many nodes as you want as long as you are not offering it as a commercial DBaaS. Our BSL protects CockroachDBʼs current code from being used as a DBaaS without an enterprise license for a period of three years. After 3 years this restriction lapses and the code becomes open source (per our current Apache license) and is free to use for any purpose.
Are the only 2 alternatives ‘hobby’ and ‘VC’? @emanuil_tolev No. @elastic
Cottage Labs LLP @emanuil_tolev @elastic
@emanuil_tolev @elastic all of the organisations on this slide wanted something open source ^ there is work to be found
There’s open source and open source though. @emanuil_tolev @elastic 4 pages of these repos. Most are web apps, but there are even some pretty useful libraries in here. Business model didn’t really allow for spending much time popularising the thing though. Not much interaction and too focussed on client work when interaction came in. ^ Nothing happens “for free”, even all the very popular tools had a lot of effort poured into advocacy at some point long ago.
Consulting Can be lots of fun and camaraderie Quite the grind @emanuil_tolev @elastic Sell time for money. Means no time left. Admin time unbillable, still has to be done. You sell 40 billable hours, run biz in another 10-20 hours on top. Burnout danger.
Unless, maybe .. sales pipeline, value-based pricing Productised Consulting? @emanuil_tolev @elastic Divorce time from value ^ Eventually just build a product if you get tired. Not as easy as it sounds with the injections of consulting cash to keep you hooked.
SaaS If your project lends itself to being SaaS-ed @emanuil_tolev @elastic
Whatever path you pick, there’s bootstrapping @emanuil_tolev @elastic By no means easy though. Neither is VC. Nothing is easy :D. Could be fun for some time depending on what you’re looking to learn and how much time you have.
Elastic’s Strategy @emanuil_tolev @elastic
Open source, free Basic, XPack, Enterprise https://www.elastic.co/ subscriptions Always hand in hand with support
All Code Open / Source Available Not Open Source — Apache 2 & Elastic License @emanuil_tolev @elastic We are not taking away anything, we are just adding more open code BTW you cannot complain about anyone providing your OSS as a service. But you can protect yourself against that and others can’t complain about that either
@emanuil_tolev @elastic
What (incentive | perception | behavior) is (OSS | Basic | Gold | Platinum) going to drive with (users | customers | OSSonly users | competitors | sales | development) @emanuil_tolev @elastic Normal users only care about free (no OSS vs Basic)
Training Consulting @emanuil_tolev @elastic Consulting is often strategic and mostly short term; primarily in combination with Support & X-Pack
@emanuil_tolev @elastic Small shops cannot afford support and don’t want to run it themselves Product for small companies and those who need a solution now without any overhead
@emanuil_tolev @elastic Own cloud account, AWS, GCP,… — if you have many clusters and want an easy way to manage them
Questions? Disagreement? Emanuil Tolev @emanuil_tolev @emanuil_tolev @elastic “What questions do you have?” (Don’t say “Do you have questions”)
How do you build a lasting and successful company that also stays true to its open source roots? This talk takes a look at why open source is important to business and three essential elements of this path:
Strategy: How can you monetize your open source product? Is it support, an open core approach, cloud services, or a combination of the three? And which ones are the features you can even commercialize without alienating your community?
Struggle: "You received a 100 million dollars in venture capital and yet you have so many open issues?!" Once money is involved the dynamics often change. How can you manage expectations and still build on a flourishing open source community?
Success: How do you balance open source and commercial success? How do you align engineering and sales decisions?
This talk takes the perspective of Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash, which makes its money with support, the commercial extensions, and cloud offerings. But we are also taking a look at how others are approaching this challenge, what worked, and what failed.
for free. You
can too.