The document discusses open source software agreements and service level agreements (SLAs). It begins with the speaker's background in open source deployment tools. It then provides examples of typical agreements for employment, software, and SaaS. For open source, it discusses support cycles and challenges with SLAs for open source projects in gaining trust and monetizing support. The speaker wishes for more open source projects to sell services and guarantees to fund development in a sustainable way.

1. Open Source and
SLAs
Noah Zoschke
noah@convox.com
@nzoschke
Open Source Show & Tell 2016

2. Bio
• Worked for 6 years at Heroku, deployment PaaS. Subsidiary of
SalesForce, one of the largest SaaS companies in the world.
• Working for past year at Convox, open source deployment toolkit.
Goals:
• Help teams save time and money making cloud infrastructure
effortless
• Build successful open source project
• Build viable open source business
• Grateful for the opportunity to experiment with new software and
business models

3. Follow Along on GitHub
https://github.com/convox/rack
Go, Docker, AWS toolkit
Used by 100s of companies

4. Software Agreement
Dialogs…

5. Employment Agreement
Hiring Manager: Here is a role, responsibilities, and a
salary.
Engineer: I accept!
Manager: Here are the things we need to do this week to
keep our business running.
Engineer: Consider it done!
Manager: Great job. Here is your paycheck.

6. SaaS Agreement
Decision Maker: Here is some functionality I need to run my
business and a budget to buy it.
Vendor: We do that and its $X / month which fits in your
budget!
Decision Maker: Great. Here is my business credit card.

7. SaaS Agreement
Upgrade Cycle
Decision Maker: I wish this service also did X.
Vendor: We do that on the pro plan that is $Y / month.
Tech: Great. You can charge me more.

8. SaaS Agreement
Support Cycle
Decision Maker: I wish this service also did Y.
Vendor: We don’t support that yet. Talk to this Product
Manager to get it on the roadmap.
Decision Maker: Ok I’ll talk and wait. I’m glad my team
doesn’t have to build it.

9. SaaS Agreement
Rejection Cycle
Decision Maker: I wish this service also did Y.
Vendor: We don’t support that.
Decision Maker: Bummer. I need this so find another
vendor I can pay for this functionality, and terminate my
subscription.
or
Decision Maker: Bummer. I’ll pay staff to build it in house.

10. OSS Agreement
Tech: Here is some functionality I need to run my business.
OSS Project: We already solved that. Agree to the software
license and you can use it free of charge.
Tech: Sweet. Free and open software is amazingly helpful
for getting my job done.

11. OSS Agreement
Support Cycle
Tech: I wish this software also did Y
Abandoned OSS Project: <crickets>
Incompatible OSS Project: Sorry we don’t want to do that
Facilitating OSS Project: Interesting idea. Follow these guidelines
to contribute a patch. We will help you and support the feature.
Magic OSS Project: Killer idea. Here is your solution.
Tech: Ok. Open source is [challenging | nice | amazing]. I’m glad I
don’t have to solve everything myself.

12. Service Level Agreements
• Software License
• Used as-is…
• Subscriptions
• Pay $25/month for 3 users access
• Support expectations
• Community; same-day
• Service guarantees like uptime and
performance or resource
• 99.9% uptime; 10k emails / month

13. Service Level Agreements
• Explicit
• Measurable
• Monetizable

14. OSS SLAs
• Generally free software “as-is” and support is best effort
• Why not?
• Sell a version as SaaS (with uptime assurances)
• Sell some closed features (open core)
• Sell same-day or same-hour support (tiered support)
• Sell a way for priority feature work (professional services)
• Sell contracts for migrations and training (professional
services)

15. OSS SLAs
Challenges
• Bootstrapping. Full time support and engineering
costs real money.
• Packaging and pricing. Building a software sales
system costs real time and energy.
• Psychology. Consumers have a free version. Why
pay anything?

16. OSS SLAs
My Challenges
• People balk at $25 / user / month
• GitHub is $9 / mo
• AWS bills are $5k / month
• Engineers cost $10k / month
• Don’t know how to price guarantees around uptime
• How much is it worth to you?
• How much will it cost to meet? Need engineers on call 24/7
• What happens when we don’t hit it?
• Trust
• Takes a lot of time and energy to gain trust

17. OSS SLAs
My Wishes
• More OSS projects sell services. Run the project like a
business. Find ways to guarantee software quality without
working for free.
• CTOs buy something. Tech company budgets are huge.
They could be better understanding OSS value sponsoring
more work which benefits us all.
• We all keep working on OSS. Critical infrastructure for our
industry.
• OSS becomes a clear value add, not an obstacle to selling
software.

18. Thanks!
Discussion / Questions / Comments ?
noah@convox.com
@nzoschke