GNU Economy: the franchising model
Getting back to customer and vendor perspectives we might better describe the OSS market in term of offer and demand, as shortly described in the table below.
| Customer Perspective | |
| The Customer demands for | ..a possible fine answer |
| Buyable business services | fixed-time/fixed-price services |
| Multiple vendor support | Retention by SLA |
| Enterprise Level Support | “Pyramidal” approach |
| Technological certainty | Continuous support |
| Indemnification | IP Coverage |
| Hardware/Software compliance | Stack Assurance |
| Vendor Perspective | |
| The Vendor wants | The impact |
| Partecipating to tech clubs | Driving standards |
| Savings by efficiency | Community building |
| Branding OS | Alliances |
| Tracking production | Forging inside |
| Appropriating returns | Franchising |
Large to Medium customers look for enterprise level vendors, but vendors independently of their dimension can not offer personalization or integration of hundreds of OSS. A pyramidal approach (mediation) is needed to deliver value added services on a large number of platforms/programs.
Uncertainty, due to scarce integration of OSS stacks, might be overrun by dependability and benchmarking services, in order to assure that the whole software environment works properly and performs.
Hardware and software compatibility is an issue too.
Mitigating Intellectual Property risks, in terms of copyright or patent infringements, might be interesting for large enterprise, since they might be sued as happened in the SCO case.
Vendors having symbiotic approach to OS Communities, know that sharing a standard, in terms of formats, protocols or a code base, requires active participation to body standard or to product roadmap definition: thread off between costs and benefits it’s strongly related to market positioning and other environmental considerations.
Reducing software production costs is feasible if there are large amounts of volunteers and/or if the Author has a well-defined partnership program to motivate participation.
Branding OSS is costly and is not clear how to appropriate returns from marketing commons, therefore alliances sounds the most effective way to brand OS products sharing costs and benefits.
Tracking software production is feasible if and only if the vendor is forging within its organisation, again vendor need to be the software’s author.
There are just two ways to make money from OSS, named “best code here” and “best knowledge here” approaches, but none of them scale very well, unless you know how:
- to become the market leader;
. - to save money through cooperative software development.
But appropriating returns is always critical and Franchising might be a good idea, at least for one of you..
