All Things Open 2013 - Open Source communities in a for profit world

Since open source has hit the mainstream, people have been trying to grep the idea of what an open source business model would be. In intermixing a for-profit organization with the freedom loving principles of the FLOSS movement, there inevitably is a struggle point between the two. Several models of business have emerged to attempt to rectify this, but each tends to come with it's own baggage along the way, and communities tend to struggle with this.

In this talk, I'll explore the business models out there that attempt to work with Open Source communities to help grow a healthy business. We'll also debate and discuss what the future holds here, and how better these business models bridge between the corporate and community needs.

Transcript

1. Open Source communities in a for profit world John Mertic SugarCRM
2. •  John Mertic –  Contact Info •  http://jmertic.wordpress.com •  Twitter: @jmertic •  jmertic@sugarcrm.com ( SugarCRM ) •  jmertic@php.net ( PHP ) –  Solutions Architect for SugarCRM •  http://www.sugarcrm.com •  http://developers.sugarcrm.com/ wordpress •  Twitter: @sugarcrmdev –  President - OpenSocial Foundation •  http://www.opensocial.org –  Voting member - PHP-FIG •  http://www.php-fig.org Who Am I?
3. What does it take to bring a product to market?
4. Need Idea Execution
5. What are the challenges to making this happen?
6. The right understanding of your target market
7. The right people to execute
8. The right resources to build from
9. But resources can be cost prohibitive
10. How do we lower the barrier of resources?
11. What do all of these companies have in common?
12. Their businesses heavily leverages…
13. How has open source played in the software world?
14. Early days were around infrastructure
15. And this was good!
16. “Now let’s focus on the user facing applications!”
17. “Linux Year of the Desktop _____!”
18. http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0&qpcustomb=
19. ~80 million users 1 billion+ users 30 million+ users
20. Why is there such a struggle?
21. http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/British-Local-Authorities-Hesitant-on-Open-Source Higher adoption around infrastructure software Lower adoption around user facing software
22. How are these companies using Open Source?
23. Infrastructure!
27. •  Lowering the barrier for product development •  Increasing overall technology adoption •  Improving the companies bottom line Open Source for a for profit company should focus on…
28. “Wait! This doesn’t seem very open source at all…”
29. “The functionality is a very small part of what companies are buying when they buy software,” says Red Hat CEO and president Jim Whitehurst in a phone interview. “We make the power of the open source development model consumable for the enterprise in the way they’re used to consuming software. We have engineering teams that track every single change — a bug fix, security enhancement, or whatever — made to Linux, and ensure our customers’ mission-critical systems remain up-to-date and stable.”
31. http://readwrite.com/2013/02/04/the-year-of-the-linux-desktop-2012 Android powers 75% of all smartphones shipped Source: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23916413#.UQKJfEpFfle
32. So how should your company address open source communities?
33. Determine commodity versus core http://www.redgatedesign.com/blog/the-commodity-challenge/
34. Find where you can contribute
36. Contribute!
37. Measure ROI of participation
38. Q/A