“equally critical of proprietary and open source myths, advocating software choice beyond marketing and romanticism”
Jeremy Allison of the Samba fame wrote an interesting blog post about Sun’s approach to open source participatory development, followed by Bradley Kuhn’s bad opinion of Oracle’s attitude towards open source.
Oracle’s plans for open source are probably not detailed enough to score, but looking at history is always instructive.
Dana Blankenhorn’s blog post “Open Source still not the first option” says that established markets are the natural fit for open source, while new markets are usually served by proprietary solutions first.
Low-end market disruption - actually occurring when technology advances faster than customers’ needs (e.g. MySQL vs Oracle, Alfresco vs Filenet) - happens in the first stages of maturity in open source adoption, while sustaining innovation probably happens at a later stage.
Stephen Walli will held the “Commercial Open Source at Work” workshop at the next Open Mobility, in March in San Francisco. The workshop is part of a joint collaboration between Stephen and myself, of which I am proud and glad.
Below the workshop summary, if you plan to go you better know early bid discount expires in 14 days.
Continue reading ‘Open Mobility USA 2010: Open Source Workshop, by Stephen Walli’
The relationship between open source communities and vendors keeps being a topic of debate these days. Simon Phipps at the South Tyrol Free Software Conference gave a talk about his “software freedom scorecard“, a method to indicate the approach vendors take to promote software freedom as part of their business strategies.
Matt Asay says we have to get used to companies separating their open-source efforts from their revenue models. We may be talking of ”fauxpen source” vendors in this case - as originally named by Taurus Balog - but it doesn’t necessarily cut open development out of the equation.
I want to make my point by having a look at how differently two companies have been building a business strategy around Apache projects. Continue reading ‘About Open Source Value Creation and Consumption’
Since last week I started to cover the “Open Innovation Awards” winners, assigned at the Open World Forum 2009.
Let’s have now a closer look at Kaltura, the open source video platform for online video management, now powering over 32800 different sites.
The following 5 “Open Innovation Awards” were assigned on Friday afternoon at the Open World Forum held in Paris. This year a jury of ten international open source experts considered as the most promising and representative of open innovation the following companies: Bonitasoft, Kaltura, Scaledb, SonarSource and Ulteo.
Let’s have a closer look at all of them by alphabetical order.
Bonitasoft, a provider of open source BPM software, recently raised 3 Millions from Ventech and Auriga Partners:
“The team, the business model, and the BonitaSoft solution completely captivated us. Given the reputation that this BPM solution has in the open source community, we are confident that BonitaSoft will contribute to the ‘democratization’ of BPM in business through its technological innovation” says Claire Houry, Ventech. “BonitaSoft has everything it needs to quickly become the open source BPM leader in the marketplace,” says Philippe Granger, Auriga Partners.
The idea of ‘democratizing’ BPM sounds fascinating, but justifying a BPM project maybe not trivial. Download numbers - if these were meant to mean anything - are ’big’ (140.000) considering that we are talking of a BPM software, but converting users into customers is a different matter.
While Intalio - probably the most famous open source BPM player around (see 2008 BPM Gartner’s magic quadrant) - goes commercial by layering editions (open core), Bonitasoft today generates revenues only through support subscriptions and services. The business model paragraph of their manifesto reports:
BonitaSoft will develop additonal versions of Bonita with professional grade technical support and advanced features to facilitate collaborative work and to industrialize Bonita deployments. BonitaSoft reserves the right to give access to these versions on a subscription basis to its customers only.
My suggestion in this respect is: the sooner the better, upselling is hardly welcomed by the users, and being clear about the business strategy can help potential customers to make their decisions.
From a community standpoint, Bonitasoft is starting to get traction, at least in terms of bug reports and feature requests, much less in terms of code contributions.
Sharing R&D costs doesn’t appear to be a major concern at the present stage, along with standards co-creation and alike.
BonitaSoft business strategy might take inspiration from Talend, but they need to work hard on fostering their ecosystem, provide third-parties with documentation and tools to ease extending the platform and maybe consider to move (also) in the cloud.
Funambol just announced the availability of Funambol v8, a redesigned AJAX version of the MyFUNAMBOL web portal, a proprietary product tailored for carriers based on their open source piece of software.
The differences between Funambol community and carriers’ editions is key to understand Funambol business model. Knowing the importance of external contributions I asked Stefano Maffulli, Funambol Community Manager, to tell me about how he passed the message to the Funambol community.
Continue reading ‘How Funambol Walks the Commercial Open Source Rope’
Last week I held the “Building an Effective Commercial Open Source Strategy” workshop at OSiM, the definitive industry event on Open Source in Mobile.
Stephen Walli and I this year worked out a richer workshop outline, aimed at covering open source software business and community issues, as well as IPR issues.
Continue reading ‘Effective Commercial Open Source Strategies Reloaded’
The Open Innovation Awards’ Jury today announced the list of the top 20 open source innovative startups that will be invited to present at the Open
Innovation Summit on the 2nd of October.
The international jury of open source experts will award the “Open
Innovation Awards” to the most promising project in terms of innovation, use of open source technologies, and value creation potential.
Continue reading ‘The 20 Open Source Innovative Startups Nominated for the Open Innovation Awards’
The Open Innovation Summit application deadline has been extended from the 1st of September until the 8th, take your chance to raise capital or meet potential partners to bring your open source solutions to the market.
If you are an open source entrepreneur willing to meet up with VCs take your time now to fill up the application form and be sure to cover the following topics: Continue reading ‘Open Source Startups: Open Innovation Summit, Last Call!’
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