You found other parts of our website that we overlooked. Thanks for finding this, and we will fix this. We don’t intend to cause further ambiguity around what it means to be “open source”, but rather clarify an issue that we believe hasn’t received enough attention: focus on customer needs. In an effort to avoid confusion, we came up with our own term, “Open Solution Definition”.

Rest assured that our continuing work on this issue will be done in fully open and collaborative ways. Just like open and collaborative development has led to great Open Source products, we believe that open collaboration by the vendor community on various business issues is the best way to achieve customer success.

Many vendors are incapable of this behavior. Some grew during the pre-WWW time when business success depended on unilateral behavior and “knowledge hoarding” than the collaborative behaviors that modern technologies now enable. Take a look at a more recent blog re: the Microsoft patent issue as an example.

I appreciated very much that you came over to comment my post and I am glad you at the Open Solutions Alliance are taking seriously this issue.

While how strong each member’s community is, it is partially due to members’ choices, licensing on the contrary is totally under their control.

I wrote about “false positive” talking about OSA’s decision to accept members not using open source licenses.

You are right saying that there is room for experimentation regarding what business models are best, but pretending to sell open source while selling proprietary software is misleading.

If you don’t compromise (only) on the degree of openness

We fundamentally believe that open and collaborative behavior is consistently superior to closed and unilateral behavior. This difference go beyond how the source code is managed, to how the company fundamentally operates; How it engages with its customers and partners, its corporate marketing, and even corporate culture and internal politics.

you should be clear about it, and tell everyone OSA has decided not to talk about open source (while not it is even under the logo, reporting “open source at work”). Then you might consider to make some changes to your website, that says:

From time to time, the OSA may use the term “open source solutions” or “open source based solutions.” We do not mean to confuse this with the OSI’s Open Source Definition, which includes requirements not included in our open solution definition.

This way OSA is contributing to make open source definition uncertain, don’t you agree?

Your opinion is always welcome.

I have been a strong advocate for the Open Source Maturity Model, and I thought that the Business Readiness Rating could be considered its evolution.

None of them became a standard yet, before them even the GRAM/GRAS list had not much success indeed.

Apparently consultants did not succeed by these means in producing definitive answers on which open source software is best suited to cover a particular need. Why? Once again one size doesn’t fit all.

Inevitably, discussion goes down the path of licensing, or how strong each member’s community it. What isn’t discussed enough, IMO, is what best meets customer needs. Ultimately that should determine which business models are best. Unfortunately, there’s no simple answer. Customer requirements can vary greatly, depending on industry, their IT best practices, the type of solution in question, and the skills and know-how required to implement it. Companies that serve different market segments must evolve their business models to best meet the requirements of that segment. Some may be more services-intensive, requiring frequent code customization for example, while others aren’t necessarily best served by purely OSD-compliant management and licensing of source code, but benefit from “open-ness” in other ways. Because open source, especially in the applications space, is still relatively new, we think there is much room for experimentation regarding what business models are best for the most customers. Consequently, we don’t limit our membership based on some preconceived notion of business models we think ought to be the best. Let customers decide that, not us.

However, there is one notion that we don’t compromise. There’s a difference between “old guard” proprietary organizations and more open, collaborative organizations. The former hoard know-how, act unilaterally, and are always trying to “manage” how customers and partners perceive their products and solutions, as if yielding as little real information as possible is the key to business success. The latter instead share know-how, and act collaboratively with their customers and within their industry, and they compete based on their ability to make customers successful. We fundamentally believe that open and collaborative behavior is consistently superior to closed and unilateral behavior. This difference go beyond how the source code is managed, to how the company fundamentally operates; How it engages with its customers and partners, its corporate marketing, and even corporate culture and internal politics. A company’s DNA is either one or the other; these don’t mix.

This is hard to quantify, but you know it when you see it when interacting with the management. There are some typical markers… GPL-licensing is a good sign. So is having public forums for customer feedback. (A closed company would never want the rest of the world to see an unfiltered view of what its customers think about its products.) But there are multiple ways a company can operate and still be “open”.

Your thoughts are welcome. I’m not sure it’s possible to form a comprehensive taxonomy of open business models, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.