Open Source as a Business: Strategy, Struggle & Success

A presentation at Building a Sustainable Opensource Ecosystem in April 2019 in Sydney NSW, Australia by Mark Walkom

Open Source as a Business Strategy, Struggle & Success Mad props to Philipp Krenn @xeraa @warkolm

https://twitter.com/ geowolf/status/ 971811346823221248

[…] allow software to be freely used, modified, and shared. https://opensource.org/licenses @warkolm

Open Source ≠ Business Model @warkolm

Open source is a distribution model that allows us to build community. It’s a force multiplier. Shay Banon, Elastic @warkolm

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!”# Where is the ? @warkolm

Strategy @warkolm

Services Support, Consulting, Training, Certification @warkolm

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https://investors.redhat.com/~/media/Files/R/Red-Hat-IR/documents/q418-fact-sheet.pdf

Support Problem Ease of Use @warkolm

Support Problem Renewal Rates @warkolm

Consulting & Training Problem Service-Only Competition @warkolm

Open Core @warkolm

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Problem Competing Tools @warkolm

Problem Less Open, More Commercial @warkolm

Problem Cloud Providers @warkolm

Cloud Service @warkolm

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Problem Cloud Providers @warkolm

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/ @warkolm

Partnerships @warkolm

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Problem Domain Specific @warkolm

Donations @warkolm

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Problem Scaling & Planning @warkolm

Certified Partners @warkolm

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Problem Requires Commercial Ecosystem @warkolm

Ads @warkolm

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Problem What Is (the Price to Be) Acceptable @warkolm

Merchandise @warkolm

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Problem Revenue @warkolm

Bounty / Crowdfunding @warkolm

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Problem Vision & Maintainablility @warkolm

Struggle @warkolm

Philosophy @warkolm

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, https://twitter.com/jessfraz/status/954802380125736961 @warkolm

Contributors Users Consumers @warkolm

[…] 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 @warkolm

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Apache 2 modified with Commons Clause (2018/08) @warkolm

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 @warkolm

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 @warkolm

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AGPL Server / Apache Clients Server Side Public License (2018/10) @warkolm

“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 @warkolm

Timing Effective Today @warkolm

Clones FoundationDB Document Layer Amazon DocumentDB @warkolm

[…] we are hereby withdrawing the SSPL from OSI consideration. http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2019March/003989.html @warkolm

Money @warkolm

Conflict of Interest Open Source vs Commercial View @warkolm

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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 @warkolm

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Venture Capital Accelerated Development vs Calling the Shots @warkolm

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Development Hobbled Product vs Starving Company @warkolm

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Commercial Code Open / Visible Code vs Closed Source @warkolm

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Tricks Open Source but… @warkolm

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Success @warkolm

Business Is Optional @warkolm

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Business Is Complicated @warkolm

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 @warkolm

Time for an Updated Model? @warkolm

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 @warkolm

More than Reciprocal Permissive vs Copyleft vs SSPL @warkolm

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All Code Open Not Open Source — Apache 2 & Elastic License @warkolm

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Training Consulting @warkolm

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https://elastic.shop

Thanks! Mark Walkom @warkolm @warkolm

Mark Walkom
@warkolm

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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 monetise 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 commercialise 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.