See http://www.usharesoft.com

I know you are right saying that some - maybe even many - open source initiatives are mainly motivated by altruism, openness and sharing. Those motivations do not prevent commercial activities around those projects.

Via twitter I was pointing you to Mitchell’s blog post about Mozilla’s sustainability (courtesy of the WayBack machine) because it is a great example of the so-called second meaning of “commercial” (see my previous comment).

About GPL strictness I’m not so sure, not in a web world at least, but I didn’t cover (yet) licensing and open source commerce.

Last but not least, I totally agree with you and Vishal, I am struggling to make open standards compliance more relevant here in Europe, the next ODF Plugfest will be a step in this direction.

At least the open source supporters are doing their coming out (thanks to Eric!)

Your analysis is perfectly correct (as well as Dirk’s one), but I’d like to moderate it on one single point :
I think that there is some open source initiatives that are not commercials!
Some open source initiatives, driven by (non profit) foundations (FSF, Mozilla, Apache…), are mainly motivated by altruism, openness and sharing (as well as by the ego of some of the contributors). Indeed, within thoose foundations, they are not equal : some are using licenses (GPL to name it) with very strong constraints about commercial use : the code developed from a GPL-licensed source code must be given back to the community with the same license!!

This is really the original (and in some way utopian) vision of Richard Stallman.

This is why I mostly agree with you. I even think that everything else is commercial (and marketing tactic)….

By the way, I’ve just read an awesome post from Vishal Vasu (http://www.vishalvasu.com/general/open-source-versus-open-standards/) that reminds us (from a user perspective) that, what is important, is that your software needs to support (useful) open standards!

Regards

I believe you’re right, SugarCRM was probably at the forefront with naming it commercial open source, but I am not sure they want to exclude open source vendors like Acquia or Sonatype.

I appreciate your decision to move away from “commercial open source” to “single-vendor open source”, really.

@jrep I am following the definition of commercial reported by David Wheeler in his paper:

Commercial means either (a) “oriented to profit-making”, or more generally (b) “of, pertaining to, or suitable for commerce”, where commerce means “intercourse, dealings, the buying and selling of commodities, or trade” So we’re talking about something (a) oriented toward profit, or at least (b) something pertaining to public trade or dealings.

I must agree with David saying that “when we include the second meaning (which some people forget), nearly all FLOSS programs are commercial”.

I’m actually not saying that the only commercial open source out there follows the single-vendor open source model. Acquia is a good example of a commercial company that is based on community software, so is TWiki. RedHat is commercial for sure too.

Because of this possible confusion that you are also pointing out, I have been moving away from “commercial open source” to “single-vendor open source”. From today’s perspective, SugarCRM overreached when coining this term.