From the outside, open source companies try to appear to be Fine Upstanding Open Source Citizens™. On the inside of the sausage factory, however, hard decisions and trade-offs are constantly being made. After nearly 15 years of working for some of the industry’s best-known open source companies, including MongoDB and Canonical, Matt Asay decided to go to work for a company that uses and contributes to open source communities but doesn’t rely on them for revenue. Matt describes the fundamental struggles every open source business has and explores how different companies have dealt with them (e.g., which features will be open vs. closed, which license to use, etc.). Matt also details why he decided to move on and why maybe you should consider doing so too.

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What I’ve learned from 15+ years in open source
Matt Asay

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What open source does so well…

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What open source promised to end…

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What a difference 10 years makes
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“There's been a stunning and
irreversible trend in enterprise
infrastructure….No dominant
platform-level software
infrastructure has emergedin the
last ten years in closed-source,
proprietary form.”
- Mike Olson, Chief Strategy Officer, Cloudera

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OPEN SOURCE HAS WON!(Open source businesses have not.)
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It’s all your fault
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The open source dilemma
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Customer
profitability
Customer need
for support
subscription
Year 1 Year 2-3 Year 4+
Startup raises $50M
or bought for $100M+
Customer opts
not to renew
Startup is shuttered
or sold for scrap

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That dilemma is now much, much worse
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Monetizing free gets harder and harder

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So what have companies done?
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Option 1: Support disguised as “subscription”
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Option 2: Proprietary software disguised as “open source/core”
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Open Core: Broken by design
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“The open core development model…simply does not work. It is a
narrowly-cast version of open source that only stands as a matter of
corporate convenience for technology providers who continue to
hold on to antiquated proprietary offerings, delivering minimal
innovation.”
- Ashesh Badani, VP & GM, Red Hat

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Option 3: Completely open, completely closed
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“You can no longer win with a closed-source
platform, and you can't build a successful stand-
alone company purely on open source….
Platform software has to be open source….
But pure-play open source companies never
survive. That's a law of nature….
[So we offer] complementary tools and layered
offerings that let customers run that pure open
source platform better, more affordably, getting
more value out of it.”
- Mike Olson, Chief Strategy Officer, Cloudera

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Option 3.1: Communities of vendors
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“[Foundations] pay for all of
the infrastructure to create
these projects, to help govern
these projects so that the
intellectual property doesn’t
fall into one particular for-
profit entity or another but
remains a neutral entity for
decades to come.”
- Jim Zemlin, Exec. Director, The Linux Foundation

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Option 4: Don’t sell open source
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@mjasay
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