Am 2019-02-19 um 01:28 schrieb Ivan Kanakarakis <ivan.kanak at gmail.com>: Hello everyone, The TIIME meeting kickstarted some very interesting discussions. One of the topics on the "Open Source Identity and Access Management " track was "Open Source Business models and cooperations for IAM". I was there on part of the discussions that started the 2nd day and expanded over the next days. The topic is dense and while it was directed to the domain of IAM, I think that comes later in the picture, after we've discussed and agreed how Open Source works, why it is important for us and technology, and how one can benefit from (using or investing in) it. Being upfront and clear on why we support Open Source is key to understanding how Open Source can support us. Trying to not repeat what others have said better and before me, I will stay short, and I'll leave you with references to people, conferences and organizations that are dedicated to this, to analyze in detail the different aspects of the subject. IMHO, there are two things that prevent us from reasoning how we can benefit (financially among other forms of "benefit") from Open Source: 1. the fact that when we talk about Open Source, we usually think about software, 2. and, that we don't talk about what we mean with terms like "success" and "sustainability" (1) But, software is about people: We build and create software to make certain aspects of people's life easier; it is always about adding value to other people. Open Source empowers the users to take part on the decisions made for the evolution of the software. This is the big differentiator between closed-source and open-source projects. Closed-source projects have users, while open-source projects have communities. The foundation on top of which a successful open source project builds, is not the service or product, it is the community. In closed-source companies, what has value is either the product, or the (almost always, private) data that the product has collected. In open-source companies the value is not on the product itself, but on the relations between the company and the users. The investment should be in maintaining this relationship, building trust, while the product evolves both from the core-dev team and the community, with respect to the community. Now, this is a hard goal. People are difficult, and in the modern world even more. Competition is high, deals will almost always benefit the closed-source companies and the risk of working in the open is higher, precisely because control is not in your hands. However, it is not impossible. There are many organizations out there, big (some very big) and small, that have succeeded. And this is where (2) comes in. Taking into account (1), expectations must be adjusted to the difficulties of the reality of Open Source. It is not about marketing and selling the product anymore; it is about managing communities and continuously delivering value. It takes time and effort to create a robust, high quality codebase and userbase, it takes time and effort to convince people you are serious about what you do, and it takes time and effort to create and maintain relations (not just deals.) Time is a very important factor, because it is a limiting factor that you cannot avoid. It has direct implications on the scale an Open Source business can have. It is unreasonable to compare Open Source companies to companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon or any other giant out there (not just because of the different business models, but also because a big part of the value comes from the data collection as well as the data control these companies can exercise.) So, we must define what "benefit" and "success" mean in the context of an Open Source business. What is a healthy growth rate, and what indicators do we use to measure it? I won't go more into this, as this email is getting bigger than the small paragraph I had in mind when I started writing. I'll close with some links to related content: The economics of software by Bryan Cantrill (CTO of Joyent) http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-software/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/12/16/the-economics-of-software-redux/ Sustain (un)conference - an event about the sustainability of open source projects https://sustainoss.org/about/ https://github.com/sustainers The community-compact - a social contract for open-source businesses and communities by Adam Jacob (CTO of Chef) https://medium.com/@adamhjk/introducing-the-community-compact-431c61ab978f https://github.com/adamhjk/community-compact Sustainable Free and Open Source Communities (SFOSC) - a project and book (in the making) about building healthy, sustainable open source communities and businesses - guiding principles, business model definitions and social contracts (like the community-compact above.) https://medium.com/sustainable-free-and-open-source-communities/we-need-sus… https://sfosc.org https://github.com/sfosc Finally, some notes on the recent discussions on some open-source projects re-licensing as a way to make money (see Redis, MongoDB, CockroachDB, etc): The tragedy of the commons clause https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2018/09/10/tragedy-of-the-commons-clause/ Open source confronts its midlife crisis http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2018/12/14/open-source-confronts-its-midlife-cr… A EULA in FOSS clothing? http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2018/12/16/a-eula-in-foss-clothing/ Cheers, -- Ivan c00kiemon5ter Kanakarakis >:3