All Open Source Software is Commercial
Eric Barroca after reading Dirk Riehle‘s slides about “The Commercial Open Source Business Model†wrote an inspiring blog post, receiving a number of interesting feedback from the business open source folk.
Let me start by recommending Dirk’s presentation, it really worths reading, but beware of his definition of “commercial open source”:
Commercial open source software projects are open source software projects that are owned by a single firm that derives a direct and significant revenue stream from the software.
Roberto Galoppini, 
Juju, 
Dirk Riehle 4:38 pm on August 21, 2009 Permalink
Thanks for continuing the discussion! Just a short note on the term “commercial open source”. As far as I understand, it was coined by SugarCRM to distinguish Sugar from say GIMP or other open source software that had no primary profit motive in mind.
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.
jrep 5:14 pm on August 21, 2009 Permalink
Including multiply-sponsored projects in “commercial open source” is a good thing, I won’t argue with you there. But I’m still not convinced that “all” open-source work is “commercial.” There are loads of projects on Tigris.Org, SourceForge.Net, github, and all the other community sites that have no sponsorship at all.
Roberto Galoppini 8:36 pm on August 21, 2009 Permalink
@Dirk thank you to rejoin this conversation!
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 sourceâ€, really.
@jrep I am following the definition of commercial reported by David Wheeler in his paper:
I must agree with David saying that “when we include the second meaning (which some people forget), nearly all FLOSS programs are commercial”.
Alain 3:37 pm on August 22, 2009 Permalink
Roberto,
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