Updates from March, 2008 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Roberto Galoppini
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Roberto Galoppini
Open Source Enterprise: Could Complex Hosting help Adoption of Open Source in mission critical apps?
Logicworks, a provider of high-availability hosting solutions based in New York, yesterday announced the launch of its Channel Partner Program, designed to provide VARs and ISVs with a business tool to capitalize on the increasing rate of customer adoption of managed services.
Logiworks recently included a managed MySQL Enterprise database for the delivery of mission-critical applications, and at the present time is the only MySQL Enterprise Platinum Partner.
Gregg Kitaeff, Logicworks vice president of sales, said:
We structured this Partner Program to provide the channel community with the trust and commitment that is needed to be successful long-term. Our revenue model is reflective of our commitment to our channel partners and the incentives offered make this program one of the most attractive on the market. Logicworks guarantees the complex managed hosting and infrastructure so our channel partners can enable their customers to focus on the growth of their core businesses.
Will Logicworks help open source ISVs to better deliver SaaS version of their applications?
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Roberto Galoppini
Funambol Business Model: Matt Asay on Funambol’s approach
Matt Asay went skying with Fabrizio Capobianco and explains the real market for Funambol.
Undoubtedly, Funambol could make money from enterprises, but why? It gains a great deal of value from this part of its community (read: device support, among other things), which it can then package up and sell to a different market (the service provider), with different add-on features that only the service provider wants or needs. It’s a very clean split between the two markets.
I wrote few times about Funambol’s “pyramidal market“, and I am really happy to read that Funambol is cash-flow positive, and I am looking forward to talk with Fabrizio next week at the Open Source in Mobile conference.
Roberto Galoppini
Open Source at Microsoft: Open Source Interoperability Initiative, NXT Partner Program and Commercial Open Source Firms
Microsoft announced a new interoperability approach, opening up previously secret specifications and protocols to open source developers (and heroes), providing a covenant not to sue them for development or non-commercial distribution of implementations of these protocols.
Am I a visionary? by osse
The Open Source Interoperability Initiative is just started, and the EU seems skeptical on Microsoft sharing plans, as is Red Hat, while Groaklaw recaps us on Microsoft’s promises. ArsTechnica reports that the EU investigation seems to have played a role, stating that Microsoft may not be up for yet another fight with regulators.
Besides the ballot resolution meeting, I doubt Microsoft is changing everything so that it can stay the same. Beyond any possible speculation of the real meaning of the non-commercial covenant, Microsoft today is probably giving up with its vertically integrated corporation approach.
The Microsoft’s de-verticalization has begun, Microsoft opening its interfaces and APIs will allow applications to be hooked more easily its products. This is a huge change, and it will affect the IT market at large. Before exploiting it further, and how and if it will impact on the open source market, a little background.
One of the most promising value of open source software is that its licensing enables coopetition. The neologism refers to a market situation in which two or more organizations compete and cooperate simultaneously. The non-rivalrous nature of software distributed under an OSI compliant license is the basis on which cooperation among open source firms can take place.
The Observatory of European SMEs, given the importance of High-tech SMEs in Europe , analyzed success factors and among them the role of networks:
Studies dealing with barriers to networking and co-operation in the area of high-tech SMEs identify a number of
reasons hampering the formation of networks among these enterprises. Many of these factors are the same as for SMEs in general, e.g. different objectives and expectations among partners and differences in enterprise culture. Also, the lack (or the importance respectively) of a ‘co-ordinator’, e.g. a larger leading firm or an agency, is relevant for the networking among high-tech SMEs, too. [..] small and large high-tech enterprises seem to have different motives to engage in networking: for high-tech SMEs the main motivator is to achieve (quick) access to markets and credibility. Hence, networking is seen to be a ‘necessity’ for high-tech SMEs. In contrast, for large high-tech firms the reasons to engage in networks include primarily access to competitive R&D and technology. [..] These fundamentally different approaches imply that smaller firms are rather oriented towards short term and concrete results. SMEs want projects to have a quick path to market and achieve returns as quickly as possible. However, networking often requires a lot of time-consuming communication and efforts before actual results are achieved and benefits are not visible immediately. But SMEs have difficulties in allowing time and delays for different processes and exchange of information. A further consequence is that SMEs prefer to form one to one collaborations rather than collaborations between groups of enterprises.
Open source consortia and other “loosely coupled†organizations among open source firms could definitely play an important role to foster communities, but as a matter of fact they suffer from above mentioned limitations.
Despite the recent rise of interest toward coopetitive alliances, effective coopetition doesn’t occur too often. Strategic-business literature lack of descriptions explaining how organizations should manage a coopetitive relationship, and how they in practice manage to compete and cooperate with other organizations.
How co-operation and competition could possibly merge together to form a strategic interdependence among firms, eventually giving rise to a coopetitive system of value creation?
ZEA Partners experience shows the importance of the creation of an intermediate organization, providing rules and regulations, aiming to secure the long term survival of the association. ZEA Partners is on duty to resolve conflicts, and considering that fields of expertise are not complementary, one of the most important reason to become a ZEA partner is definitely to get a more formal status. Organizations within ZEA Partners are willing to cooperate on activities that are far away from applications that could generate an income:
It is knowledge that is not close to an application, and that means that it is knowledge that can easily be shared.
Therefore OS firms sharing the same knowledge can easier co-operate through customer distance (i.e. the closer to the customer, the more competition). The rules and regulations that an intermediate organization could issue don’t include licensing to manage the coopetitive relationship.
But the concept of competition might include relationships with suppliers and customers, rather than restrict coopetition only to relationships among cooperating firms that compete in the same market and want to reach the same customers.
Customers asking for not differentiating IT solutions or not competing (e.g. public administrations), could take advantage of the possibility to share with suppliers assets like source code and also blueprints to implement such technologies. Allowing them to reuse by other customers might turn to be a viable strategy to obtain enhancements and discounts.
Suppliers on the other hand can take advantage of customers’ ability to set user requirements and through blueprints can turn their customers in testimonials, reporting about such best practices.
Now, how does the Open Source at Microsoft fit into the picture?
Microsoft recently launched another initiative, the NXT partner program geared towards Open Source ISVs. The program is aimed at providing open source ISV with information to make it easier to develop and sell open source software on Windows. Microsoft NXT partner provides ISV with a range of services, ranging from marketing support to technical advice, including also business model definition and channel delivery plans.
All in all the Microsoft NXT partner program, the Open Source Interoperability Initiative and the just started Forge New Powers to me seems to be part of a general strategy. As a matter of fact there is a lot of free and open source software deployed on Windows, and Microsoft is refocusing on fostering value creation also partnering with open source firms.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft will eventually give rise to a coopetitive system of value creation in the next future, helping IT firms to exploit the role of networks, as none else could possibly will to do.
Am I a visionary?
Roberto Galoppini, 
Juergen Geck
Google is beating everybody including Microsoft in owning customer data. If you keep everything on your servers, make it voluntary (or at least make it seem voluntary) and convenient, you have a achieved a lot more control than even Microsoft. In this reality, what use are artefacts of a time when there were no standard file formats?
The answer is none.
Because artefacts is exactly what Microsofts proprietary APIs and data formats become if solutions are either build as hosted environments (Google), or based on open standards (many open source projects), or hosted or inhouse at the customers discretion and built on open standards (Open-Xchange).
So it makes a lot of sense for Microsoft to release as much as possible into the open, before it can become a legacy that costs them money to maintain. And at the same time, with the same decision, complement their farce of a standard – ooxml, which is going through heavy turbulences right now anyway – with a backup strategy.
What that means for the IT market in general is that Microsoft stacks become incrementally more open to integrate with. And open to integrate with in two ways: a)
to have ISVs pay license fees to Microsoft if they want to use the newly released APIs. Fair is fair, access to markets is an assett worthwhile selling. b) for free for open source projects. What makes b) interesting is that via an open source project, not for profit, sponsored by company xyz etc. it now becomes possible to have data reside in non-Microsoft associated repositories. For free. With open source. And no inhibition to service this open source plumbing.
And this means that integration with customer data hawked by Microsoft software has just become a little easier. First and foremost for those customers who have their data locked away from themselves by Microsoft.
Roberto Galoppini
Juergen,
thanks to join th conversation. It looks like if you have a lot to say about it, I will ask you more to write a post if you don’t mind.
Is it ok with you?
Roberto Galoppini
Open Source Think Tank 2008: some feedback
Olliance Group and DLA Piper last week hosted the third Open Source Think Tank “The Future of Commercial Open Source”, bringing together industry leaders to brainstorm potential solutions to the issues that commercial open source is facing today.
This is the open source season by Philisopher Queen
The Open Source Think Tank is the greatest networking event in the open source arena, gathering about 130 professionals ranging from CIOs and open source firms’ CEOs, to consultants, analysts and VCs.
Andrew Aitken, Olliance Group CEO, kicked off the meeting with some opening remarks, reporting about the lack of resources – as later confirmed by many CIOs demanding for a better vendors’ support – and foreseeing an increase in consolidation over the next years, prediction confirmed also by Larry Augustin.
Andrew in his speech mentioned also the fragmentation of open source, an old mantra that miss the value of the Group Forming Networks, also known as Reed’s law:
The utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network.
The number of mature open source projects and developers is raising daily, last but not least at the Google Code site, and many of them answer vertical markets‘ needs. Chris Anderson keynote, on the second day, remarked the importance of the so called “long tail”, and introduced us to Chris’s last adventure: open source hardware and its still obscure licensing.
Many CIOs during their panel sessions screamed against license proliferation, a term referring to the so called “explosion of choice” in open source licensing. Why that? I think that Larry Rosen was right telling them that it is plenty of proprietary licenses, and I tried to figure out why all this concern for open source licensing. Talking with Colin Bodell, Amazon VP Website Applications Platform, I confirmed the idea that the big guys cook their own meal. Basically they don’t need to spend time and effort with any procurement process to acquire (by downloading) open source software, but they have to ask the legal department. I see the problem, though I understand that SMEs are not affected by this, while they experience a much bigger problem with open source software selection.
Europe and North-America are definitely two different markets: Europe look for solutions, while USA ask for products. John Newton, Alfresco’s CTO, once speaking about these differences told me:
This is a phenomenon that I have observed for over 20 years. It may have something to do with the proximity of US companies to the software developers, their earlier development of software, a cultural willingness to experiment with business, or just general risk taking.
After speaking with few North-American CIOs I believe John is right, but that is definitely not the only difference
European public administrations demand for open source, while in North-America customers are mainly medium to large enterprises. It is not by casualty that I didn’t meet any representatives of North American Public Administrations at the Open Source Think Tank, I think. On the contrary every Italian open source conference see little participation of Manufacturing or Financial CIOs, but it is packed by people from public institutions.
I really enjoyed brainstorming sessions, and I asked Cristopher Keene, CEO of Wavemaker, formerly known as Activegrid, to summarize our first session, when we were asked to brainstorm on the following question: Does the open source industry need another organization to represent it’s increasingly broader commercial interests?
The idea we developed at the open source thin tank was to create a council of CIOs who use open source products within their organizations.
The goal of this council would be to educate the open source community about business issues which make it hard for CIOs to adopt open source, such as licensing complexity and product completeness. The council could also drive an important dialogue around licensing requirements and patent indemnification risks that are holding the industry back now.
One way to start this council would be as an outgrowth of Open Source Think Tank conference. CIO attendees of this conference could identify what they see as the top three barriers to open source adoption today and then work over the next year to articulate what they would like to see vendors doing to overcome these barriers.
Christopher rightly suggested to connect to Jerry Rosenthal, Open Invention Network CEO, but we eventually ended missing the opportunity for the time being. I think that the idea we discussed for about an hour would merit to be investigated further, considering also the possibility to create different councils for different market segments. Customers’ dimensions could refine matching criteria to bring CIOs under the same umbrella.
During brainstorming session I happened to talk with Richard Daley (Pentaho), Erica Brescia (Bitrock), Mike Milinkovich (Eclipse), Brian Gentile recently appointed as Jaspersoft CEO, Larry Rosen, Mark Brewer (Covalent, now SpringSource), and many others.
Beyond brainstorming sessions the Open Source Think Tank was a great chance to meet in person the who’s who of open source. I found myself chatting with our open source hero MÃ¥rten Mickos, congratulating him up on his honors while drinking a glass of Californian wine (call me conservative, I still tend to prefer Italian ones!). I happened to talk with so many interesting people that I am afraid to forget mentioning some of. Sanjiva Weerawarana (wso2) and I spoke about OSI and how open source is growing in Asia. I finally had a chance to meet in person Sam Ramji, Robert Duffner and Bryan Kirschner to talk about Microsoft open source strategy. I spent an evening with Ross Turk, and I enjoyed meeting Philippe Cases (partechvc), kindly introduced to me by MÃ¥rten. I had breakfast with Raven Zachary (the 451 Group), and we planned to meet up in Europe soon to talk more. A small chat with Kim Polese (SpikeSource), kindly introduced to me by Sam during the wine tasting around the Napa Valley, and I also had a short but interesting spot with Larry Augustin just before Chris Andersen’s keynote. I really enjoyed speaking with Dave McAllister (adobe) about open standards and with Dominic Sartorio about OSA, I definitely need to report about all these IT conversations in a series of postings.
I had great time with many sipping some wine, among them: Joseph A di Paolantonio, Aaron Fulkerson (MindTouch), Roger Burkhardt (ingres), and I was happy to meet few other European actors: Tjeerd Brenninkmeijer (Hippo), Alexandre Zapolsky (Linagora) , Bertrand Diard (Talend). Talking about Europe I had also the opportunity to discuss with Olliance people about an Italian Open Source Think Tank, let’s see if it could eventually happen..
An open question: Why I didn’t see any Solution Providers, but Accenture?
Related posts: Chris Coppola – Chris Keene – Chris Marino
Roberto Galoppini
European Open Source Projects: more on Qualipso
So far, it’s not clear how open QualiPSo’s operations will be, or how much its activities will benefit all of the European OSS community, not just QualiPSo members. Besides these concerns, in this first year there has also been grumbling about the lack of a published work plan and, in general, of enough information and interaction between QualiPSo and the community. There is still time to fix this now that the project has officially gone public.
Roberto Galoppini
Open Source Think Tank Meetings: Ross Turk and the State of the Art of the SourceForge Marketplace
The 2008 Open Source Think Tank was a great chance to meet in person great people in the open source business community, a must for whom interested in professional networking.
On Friday I spent an evening chatting with Ross Turk, and I asked him to tell about SourceForge Marketplace state of the art.
The SourceForge.net Marketplace has been a very interesting experience. As you know (or may not know, actually), we wanted to start down this path with an implementation that was as flexible as
possible. We didn’t want the tool we provided to limit the creativity of its primary users, our community. We felt strongly that it was a better idea to simply provide the tool and watch how people use it, since they’d come up with far more creative uses than we could come up with ourselves.That said, what we released appears on the surface to be rather basic. Under the covers, there was a lot of effort put into some stuff that nearly nobody will ever see but the system can’t exist
without, so I don’t want to say it wasn’t a lot of work – but to the users, it’s a simple listing and transaction engine. Just about anything can be listed for sale, and almost any kind of transaction
can take place. There’s a flipside to that, though, because in order to get that flexibility as quickly as we did we’ve implemented mostly just the bare necessities. Even in retrospect, I think that was a good strategy, because almost immediately we began to learn things.First, we learned that people are interested in the idea. People are responding to it in pretty large numbers; growing numbers, in fact, and I think that’s good.
Second, we learned that there are a few types of transactions that people seem to want to do that our system doesn’t support. For example, people who want to sell services by the hour are working around the lack of that ability by creating listings for a single hour of service and dealing with the discrepancy in purchase price with the buyer directly. Adding the capability to have per-incident, per-hour, and per-project pricing would be useful to a lot of people.
Probably the most subtle thing we’re learning is how to balance the market-based nature of what we have built with the somewhat non-market tendencies of our community.
Some projects are happy to have their services prominently displayed, but I can imagine there are a few folks out there who would rather keep the suggestion of commerce as far away from them as possible. I think that our community has varying opinions on the commercialization of open source, which leads to the question: At what point does suggesting available services on the pages of an open source project stop providing value for that project? I think we’re learning where that line is.
Ross, what about the SourceForge Advisory Board? Â
There’s not a whole lot to say about the SourceForge Advisory Board yet, since not a lot has happened! In a nutshell, though, here’s the deal: we realized last year that, while we think we know about our business and our position in the open source ecosystem, there’s a good likelihood that we’re a bit too intimate with what we do to be as accurate on those things as we could be with a little help. We need an external group of people who understand what we are, what we should become, and what we should value.
Right now, we’re planning an initial kickoff meeting in California. I assumed that dealing with the travel logistics of an international advisory board would be a monster task, but I seriously underestimated the difficulty of just getting eleven people to agree on a date. 🙂 We’ll all know a little bit more about this topic once that happens, I think.
Ross I simply can’t wait to join you and the others, please keep me updated. All the best!
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Dominic
Hi Roberto,
Good post. IMO, Sourceforge Marketplace is a great innovation for open source. At the Think Tank, we heard a lot about how enterprise customers face a shortage of expertise and support options for their use of open source. What better way to address this problem than with the same grassroots, bottom-up style that has made open source successful all along? The Marketplace enables an open, peer-to-peer model of exchanging expertise. Anybody can put up their shingle, saying they are in business of offering support and services, and anybody can find them to procure those services. Nice work, Ross!Dominic
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Roberto Galoppini
Hi Dominic,
I believe you are right saying so, SourceForge Marketplace might greatly help users and potential customers to find professional support, especially for less known open source projects.
I will soon write about my personal take aways from the Open Source Think Tank, I see you just posted on the subject, well done!
Keep in touch Dominic,I would be really glad to help with OSA Europe.
Roberto Galoppini
European Open Source Projects: Qualipso Conference (part II)
The second day of The First International QualiPSo conference – “Boosting innovation and growth by fostering Open Source Software trust and quality” – I arrived just in time to attend the “Legal issues in OSS” debate, moderated by Stéphane Dalmas (INRIA).
The end or a new beginning? by kreativekell
Stéphane insistently asked the panelists why Europe should accept what he called “US-centric FOSS licenses”, eventually ending to let the audience yawn at the second question on the same topic. I bring some statistics on the table, saying that roughly 75% percent of open source software, at least on SourceForge, is released under GPL/LGPL (of which about 65% under GPL), and I don’t see the point to create a (European) license when EU is definitely not a software house.
I also asked Till Jaeger, of JBB Law in Germany and one of the driving forces behind the Institut für Rechtsfragen der Freien und Open Source Software, if the AGPL was going to take over in his opinion, at least among small European OS firms. Till represented FSFE in Germany and Harald Welte in GPL enforcement cases, and he said that among the local firms he is advicing AGPL is an emergent phenomenon.
Last but not least Phil Robb introduced the audience to HP vision to setup methodologies, process and tools to manage licenses’ complexity.
The following forum – “Business models and strategies†session – was moderated by Franz Kurdofer, Principal Consultant at Siemens, who opened the session saying that QualiPSo future work would be to recommend the best open source strategies depending on selected business models.
Jean-Noel de Galzain, CEO of Wallix, started apologizing because, he said, he had to set up his presentation in the ten minutes he had before. His speech basically was about Wallix, a promising European OS firm I didn’t know before, but we lost the chance to hear from his voice a definitely much more interesting story.
Diego Lo Giudice, Principal Consultant at Forrester, being the only analyst among the panelists was supposed to be the keynote speech of the session. His taxonomy of open source business models was basic [slide 19] (SaaS, Product Focused, Service Focused) and filled with inaccuracies, such as listing OpenLogic among SaaS-based firms or citing Funambol’s ten million downloads mark (a number I really wish Fabrizio to reach before doomsday!). He eventually closed his speech with a slide about real truth about the future beyond 5+ years, displaying only a big ‘?’.
Do we have to think that Forrester analysts have no idea of what will be the possible evolution of the OSS market? This may explain why just a few years ago most of the consulting firms were convinced that OSS was a “flash in the pan” and would have never reached significant market share…
Björn Lundell, chairman of the Open Source Sweden, a one-year old industrial Swedish Open Source Association, showed a slide [30] relating “commodification” of FOSS, ranging from not differentiating to differentating, to cooperation, from intra company to inter company.
Cédric Thomas, CEO of the OW2 Consortium, talking about productized services said that the subscription is a healthy market, and that despite there is a lot of traction for SaaS he doesn’t see it replacing the dominant purchase and license mode.
I asked the panelists about the Sun-MySQL deal, and I noticed that none of them spoke about open source business models, mentioning only specific aspects like licensing. The result was that the company’s strategy, or how a specific firm differentiates itself and deals with the competition, was not effectively described, neither understood.
Jean-Pierre Laisné, Bull, formerly Chairman of the Board for the ObjectWeb Consortium, moderated the last forum “A network of OSS competence Centres“. He was the only one conducting the session proactively, posing interesting questions to the panelists and doing so eventually catching the audience attention.
Petri Räsänen, President of COSS, one of the oldest European FOSS competence centers, stated:
Are you trying to create a compentence center from scratch? It takes years!
Petri said that the COSS is stimulating FOSS firms to work together with a common “vertical” goal, agreeing with me about the importance of avoiding horizontal aggregation of firms. In this respect I suggested Jean-Pierre to look deeper into the horizontal vs vertical debate, considering the lack of information about consortia and associations in QualiPSo’s deliverables.
I asked Marco Fioretti, Linux Journal Editor, a comment about the conference:
In several moments the conference sounded to me like some LinuxWorld show of 6/7 years ago; sure, OSS is a very smart business strategy both for producers and corporate users, but we already knew it and even Qualipso knows it. Personally, however, I have the feeling that Dana Blankenhorn is right when he says that this may be the best way to make EU officially accepts OSS as soon as possible. I’m not necessarily happy about it, of course…
(Just to recall, Dana wrote “the insights aren’t that deep. They don’t seem to be much more than what you would get from an hour’s worth of Googling.”)
Summarising:
- Considering that QualiPSo aims at facilitating the reusability of the results of the project to let the QualiPSo competence centers able to deliver consultancy services on FOSS based business models, a better understanding of business models is a must;
- Getting involved people from FOSS communities is also a must, especially to avoid self-referentiality. Talking about OSS and not presenting what self-sustaining communities (like Debian or KDE) are doing restrict the range of observed phenomenons (consider that half of the linux kernel is community-developed…)
. - While it is encouraging to know that the Commission is investing quite a lot in OSS, it seems that smaller and more focused projects have obtained in the past (and are obtaining now) more “bang for the buck”.
. - Up to now, most competence centers across EU have demonstrated little impact on the creation of a regional/national OSS market. What Qualipso is doing in improving the situation?
- For your next conference, organize your roundtables so every panelist has the opportunity to show its true competences…
Davide, and 1 other are discussing. 
Davide
Pay attention to the legal session…. Phil Robb did not attend the conference… probably you are speaking about Martin Michlmayr…
Roberto Galoppini
Hi Davide, nice hear from you.
Both Phil and Martin attended the conference, and it was a great pleasure to speak with them about FOSSology and FOSSBazaar.
Phil was indeed invited to join the panel, as clearly results from his own blog at FOSSBazaar.
I suspect you didn’t attend the legal session yourself.. 😉
Martin Michlmayr
Davide, this blog posting is about the QualiPSo conference in Rome earlier this year where Phil gave a presentation. It’s correct that he didn’t attend the recent event in Paris.
Roberto Galoppini
Hi Martin,
if you think that the last QualiPSo conference raised interesting issues I’d be happy to write about it. Let me know.
Ciao,
Roberto
Roberto Galoppini
Microsoft Italy meets the Italian blogosphere
Microsoft Italy invited some Italian bloggers to talk about the present and the future of the IT market, (permanent) interoperability and open standards, technological and business trends, web 2.0 and software+services.
It will be also a chance to talk about Microsoft’s products and strategies with Mario Derba, recently appointed Microsoft Italy CEO. I am looking forward to know if Paula Rooney is right being doubtful about Zimbra’s future.
Follow me on twitter tomorrow, from 6 PM (GMT+1)!
Roberto Galoppini
Open Source Books: “Finalmente LIBERO!” is Out!
I am proud and happy to announce that the book I coauthored “Finalmente LIBERO Software libero e standard aperti per le pubbliche amministrazioni” (Finally FREE: free software and open standards for public administrations) is out.
The book is aimed at public authority leaders, providing them with information to make informed decisions on open source acquisition and usage. The book starts off by describing open source and free software characteristics, and then goes on reporting Public Administrations’ experiences with open source adoption, generally recognized mature solutions and also addressing interoperability issues.
I wrote the Open Source Business Model chapter, starting off by making clear commercial is definitely not an antonym of FLOSS, and then highlighting the most important differences among proprietary, corporate open source and community open source paradigms (plus some experiences, like what is going on at Codeplex). Idealtypes are not the ultimate answer, but they can help to understand open source vendors’ approaches and eventually choose the most appropriate to accomplish our ICT needs.
About open source business models I extensively wrote about opportunities and threads regarding appropriating returns from commons, and how important is for open source firms to symbioticly foster their own communities. I reported also many different open source business model taxonomies, along with some business development considerations.
Want to know more? Buy the book! 😉
The book has been published by Mc Graw Hill, and it is in Italian.
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