Free as in speech, not beer
- Article 5 of 16
- LinuxUser & Developer, September 2005
In the first of a series of articles on the changing market for open source software, Rob Buckley looks at how various companies have met the challenge of making money from the open source software model
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Hichert argues that companies are perfectly free to use and configure the open source packages Astaro’s network security products manage. But for a single product that includes these technologies in an easy-to-use system, companies are perfectly happy to buy a closed source management package, particularly since that’s the only way Astaro can afford the R&D necessary to create this product, he says.
It’s a similar tale for Scali, a Norwegian company that produces software for managing high performance computing Linux-based clusters. The software grew out of an internal project at the Norwegian engineering firm Kongsberg Informasjonskontroll. While the software for running the clusters was open source and ran on a GNU/Linux platform, the management software was written by the firm from scratch. When it realised the potential of the software as a commercial product, the company decided to float it off within a separate company, with the help of venture capital investment.
While some academics, the original market for Scali’s technology, objected to buying the closed source management software, as the company changed its target market to the more profitable commercial space, so the complaints went away. According to Bjørn Skare, president and CEO of Scali, the decision to keep its software closed source, even though it builds on an open source foundation, is one of practicalities.
“If it’s open source, the customers can change the code, but will want us to support them. That’ll give us all the economic disadvantages but no control. Secondly, software is really just knowledge. If we were to open our code, our competitors would know how we do things and we would no longer have an advantage.”
Both Skare and Hichert agree that more and more companies are willing to use open source software for important functions in the enterprise. But both maintain that the ability to see the code of open source packages is irrelevant to most companies. This makes the hybrid model of selling software that combines open source with proprietary code viable. It also, says Hichert, is more lucrative and therefore more attractive.
But to use the model requires good faith in dealings with the rest of the community. It’s only because the company commits a third of its development resources – between $300,000 and $400,000 a year – to the open source projects its products are designed to manage (and because it is “religious about not fooling about with [the terms of open source] licences”) that it can continue to receive the good will of the rest of the community.
As open source software becomes more acceptable to enterprises, it’s clear that many are making the switch to save money, rather than because they want to avoid vendor lock-in or to make changes to the code themselves. Others, however, want to switch to open source for those very reasons. Picking the right approach for the right market is the first challenge for any aspiring company.
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