Dana Blankenhorn has been a journalist, writer and part-time futurist for over 30 years.
It is getting harder and harder to see viable business plans for open source. The recession which were supposed to be so great for open source is having the opposite effect: Instead of customers rushing to the open source model with "paid support", customers are cutting back on support and services.
The answer from open source companies such as Alfresco (and Red Hat etc) is to offer "premium" versions with vital parts offered in ways reminiscent of the old economy proprietary software.
Where exactly are all of the advantages and customer guarantees when vital parts can die with the company?
Seems to me that the most successful model (and perhaps the only successful model excluding Red Hat) is the "collaborative foundation" model like Linux and Apache.
Mozilla have had some success with their model, but they could soon find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place if their "eyeballs" agreement with Google ends.
But only a few high-profile projects are suitable for the foundation model, and certainly only one per category.
A feeling is sneaking up on me that in 5 years we will look back at the failed open source hype and shake our head in disbelief over our naivety.
No, I'm not saying that open source will die. I'm quite certain that Linux, Apache and probably OpenOffice will exist in 5 years.
But I'm equally certain than many, many open source startups will have bowed. They are struggling already. Once customers realize that also open source products can be abandoned they will see software licensing as a kind of insurance that someone will always be willing to pick up the ball. Which is certainly not the case with many narrow open source projects.
The RMS ideology style open source is not sustainable. Open source will soon receive a healthy dose of pragmatism.
Matt Asay can’t write freely about the struggles of his employer Alfresco. But Robert Galoppini can, and he does this weekend with keen insight.
(The word agonistes refers to struggle, and the agony of struggle, but you may be more familiar with it in the title of the great historian Garry Wills’ first book, Nixon Agonistes. Its subtitle is worth noting — “the crisis of the self-made man.”)
Alfresco’s agonistes, which is common with all enterprise open source companies, is maintaining open source credibility while bringing in enough cash to keep the doors open.
It’s a tightrope walk, and the balance between its free “labs” version and paid “enterprise” versions is sometimes criticized.
Galoppini writes that Asay’s recent conversion from support for the GPL to BSD licensing may be part of this struggle. While it’s likely too late to switch from the GPL, he suggests a move toward GPLv3 with attribution — GPLv3 the SugarCRM way – may be in order. (Matt may take that as a compliment, given his views on SugarCRM’s former CEO John Roberts.)
Alfresco founder John Newton is upfront about things on his own blog. Part of his solution is to make links to proprietary systems, like Oracle, which Alfresco writes, available only to paid customers:
We started with Alfresco 3 to put extensions to proprietary databases such as Oracle or SQL Server into the enterprise release only, while extensions to MySQL, Ingres and other open source databases were available in open source. Now with the Alfresco Enterprise 3.1, we will be adding system monitoring capabilities and easy clustering administration that will only be available as part of the enterprise version.
Galoppini also writes of another possibility, a low-level “starter” version that is open source and whose availability is time-limited.
“The question is not anymore if your community wants to trade time to save money or to trade money to save time, but more likely how much money they are able to invest, and for what,” he writes.
It should be noted here that Wills was not unsympathetic to his subject, either, although the Nixon people did not see things that way. Partly for this attitude toward criticism the Nixon era ended badly. May Alfresco have a happier ending.
