is highly evolved - Long history of evolving techniques for managing large, dispersed, asynchronous development teams - Provides effective distributed governance - Eliminate bottlenecks through a process that weights towards a majority of active participants, but preserves ability to process minority objections. - Meritocracy – responsibility is earned and recognized by other contributors. - Focused on individuals, not on organizations. - Immediate access to massive catalog of compatible open source technologies when developing new features - Code contributors free to look at other (open source) code and learn from it – prohibited in many proprietary code shops. - Diverse knowledge sources (blogs, forums, multiple sources of documentation and expertise) for users to leverage - Immediate feedback loop - With all source code available online, there is constant, real-time access to pre-release versions of the software by interested parties. - Code must be written for sharing in mind – favors good coding practices which benefit long-term maintainability.
source projects started out as “cheap clones” of proprietary software. Higher evolution speed has allowed open source to surpass in quality and capability in many areas, and more areas cross this threshold all the time. Close source (slower evolution) Open source (faster evolution) Time
to license terms that don’t align well with their values.Long history of evolving techniques for managing large, dispersed, asynchronous development teams - Single supplier means all-or-nothing relationship - Relationship deterioration can be catastrophic. - No ability to self-support or look for third-party support alternatives if vendor is unreliable or misaligned. - Cost is not directly proportionate to value - Shelfware, project failure or cancellation does not diminish payment obligations. - Surprise fees if hardware platform changes. - New functionality and even fixes pushed into upgrades, with new fees - Support is a vendor cost, not a profit center - Causes inattention to support - This was acceptable only when there were no alternatives. There are now alternatives in many product categories - First mover with an “open source” alternative in an existing market has a strong tailwind with customers
with their interest better when an alternative exists. Open source is typically such an alternative – and if you don’t provide it, prepare for someone else to do so!
market with established brands is extremely difficult and costly. “Open Source” provides an umbrella brand that provides instant awarenessSingle supplier means all-or-nothing relationship - WSO2’s Enterprise Service Bus sales have been driven to a large extent by google searches of “Open Source Enterprise Service Bus” by prospects already aware of brands like IBM and Oracle. - “Open Source” as a brand is as powerful today as any other brand. - Where multiple open source brands exist, it is an easier competitive challenge to become the premier open source offering – and compared directly against the leading proprietary product, catapulting you into the top two. - Open Source implies lower cost – but once a product is discovered and evaluated as superior, cost diminishes in importance as a selection factor. - Analysts, industry experts etc. give open source alternatives some leeway (e.g. sales volumes, user counts are relaxed in Gartner/Forrester industry reports due to the recognition of different revenue curves and free usage.
versions available on demand (download) - Can use without legal review - Advanced usage limited only by expertise (no external barriers to adapting, extending, modifying the code.) Cost is not directly proportionate to value - Open nurtures community - Since code is a “community resource,” users are more likely to become fans and evangelists - Payment of license fees is not a requirement for community participation.
source projects is preferred by many developers: - Global impact of shipping code on the industry can be larger and faster. - Exposes individual expertise to a global audience (no matter where you reside.) - Code and not just expertise can follow developer to the next employer. - Inherently mission-oriented – developers believe open source is better for society – and therefore feeds idealism and passion.
today from IP claims (patent trolling in the US is widely recognized as excessive and damaging to innovation.): - Open source is not immune, but there are some protections: - Licenses like Apache require all participants to cross-license. You won’t get sued by another company that has contributed to the project. - Open Source organizations like Apache Software Foundation have a special social position – pushing an IP claim against software available from the ASF is akin to suing a sweet little old lady. - OK not to offer indemnification to every user. - Certainly no free user of open source would expect indemnification since they aren’t in a commercial relationship. - Customers of support services are often willing to obtain their own insurance or self-insurance against IP claims, as they are not obtaining licenses for the software but using the free downloads and paying for support services.
with customer requests - More participation and “ownership” by customers leads to fine tuning feature requests from real on-the-ground user feedback - Flatter organizations: - Convergence of R&D, support, and consulting functions closes the loop between customer and R&D, and leads to varied and challenging careers. (WSO2 engineers spend 50% of their time doing R&D, the rest working support, marketing, and consulting rotations.) - Enhanced scalability - Distributed development scales gracefully to larger numbers of developers - Encourages appropriate factoring of projects into manageable scopes and sizes
flexible - Large constituent base drives diverse user base, leading to increased attention on optimal factoring, extensibility models, plug points, and adaptability - Diversified risk - No single organization manages the fate of the code. Open roadmap and deep technical relationship allows direct customer influence. In worst case, projects can be forked if agreement cannot be found. Code escrow can be done mechanically by anyone any time. Developer skills not monopolized by a single entity - Yes, some people use it for free - This bothers some people a lot. I recommend getting over it. - Some percentage of free use is a cost of doing business – many free users have no ability or mechanism to pay in any case so they don’t all directly represent lost revenue. - Even free users have a lot of value: they displace competitors, nurture developer skills, spread word of mouth, provide testing and bug reports, blogs and other content that contributes to a vibrant ecosystem. - Some of these users will eventually convert to paying customers.
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