Open Source as a Business
A presentation at FOSS Backstage in in Berlin, Germany by Philipp Krenn
Open Source as a Business Strategy, Struggle & Success Philipp Krenn 44444444 @xeraa
https://twitter.com/geowolf/status/ 971811346823221248
Ninety-eight-point-five percent of the code ever put into the core of Puppet was put in there by somebody I paid. https://www.geekwire.com/2018/might-time-big-cloud-share-wealth-open-source- startups/
Open Source ≠
Business Model
Developer !
Where is the ! "
?
Services Support, Consulting, Training, Certification
https://investors.redhat.com/~/media/Files/R/Red-Hat-IR/documents/q418-fact-sheet.pdf
Support Problem Ease of Use
Support Problem Renewal Rates
Service Problem Consulting-Only Competition
Open Core
Problem Alternatives
Problem Cloud Providers
Problem Lock-In
Cloud Service
Problem Cloud Providers
The intent of open source software was not so that someone else can take the exact same software and offer it as a service. https://www.geekwire.com/2018/might-time-big-cloud-share-wealth-open-source- startups/
Struggle
[...] 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
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. https://twitter.com/jessfraz/status/954802380125736961
If you’re unhappy with an open source project you’re entitled to a full, immediate refund to the $0.00 you paid for it. Alternatively, get involved with the project to make it better. https://twitter.com/MikeMcQuaid/status/970000490468708352
Venture Capital Accelerated development vs business dynamics
Where is the ☢ ⚠ ☣ ?
Development Hobbled Product vs Starving Company
Releases Multiple Products vs Proprietary Plugins
Open Open Source vs Open Code
Commercial Features Engineering (Open Source) vs Sales (Commercial)
Elastic's Strategy
Support & Plugins
All Code Open Not Open Source — Apache 2 & Elastic EULA
Training Consulting
https://elastic.shop
Conclusion
Business Is Optional
Business Is Complicated
Questions? Philipp Krenn 444 @xeraa
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 monetize 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 commercialize 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.
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