OSS Watch : Open Source in a Company Business Model
Next up is a presnetnation by Kit Blake of Infrae who will be talking about Open Source in a Company Business Model. He will be followed by Jim Farmer, talking about the comercialization of Open Source
Lecture notes follow
Lecture Notes : Infrae
---------------------------
Not that many differences between open source and closed source business models. Infrae is based in Rotterdam! they build content management tools mostly based on Zope.
No income from selling software, only from provision of services. Spending on sales is limited by the model, promoting the software is problematic when people can use it for free. You have to be sure you're going to get some kind of services deal out of the end.
Suggests that OS ensures honest business practices 'We never sell the same feature twice'.
The basic plan was to be just like a proprietary software provider, but sacrifice the 20-30% of revenue you expect from licenses and make it up with more development and consultancy. Initial market was universities - the company already had contacts and the IT departments knew about Open Source, this is less of an issue today, more people understand what is happening.
[ Third? appearance of the technology adoption life cycle graph at this conference ]
Talks about the benefit of having networks around the technology you're working with. (In this case Zope). Goes on to talk about the need to get customers talking and build networks both social and technical (customer issue trackers are open to all customers!). Use Trac as an issue tracker, sprints are good for bringing developers together - based on a XP basis - have now rolled this out to customers as well bringing customers into the development directly.
[Nice to see another appearance of XP at this conference. So far nothing but good things from the people who've been trying it]
Open source customer relations tend to be different because they can watch the repository, ToDO lists and so on. This works with technical customers, but doesn't work so well with commercial clients.
Back to the crossing the chasm stuff (moving from early adopters to early majority). Part of doing this was about providing 'the whole product' - documentation, training, support, debugging and so on. "Services have to be excellent, communication is the first complaint" - RTFM is not acceptable :-)
Probably some significant benefits to being on 'neutral ground' rather than your own repositories etc.
Notes on launching an OS project
----------------------------------------
Place in a neutral environment
Have a leader who answers *every* query
Community is either going to happen or it won't
Communities need constant attention and infrastructure
Customers don't order refactoring - only features
New customers need a lot of coaching
On the plus side ongoing maintenance etc. can become a significant income stream
Lecture Notes : Jim Farmer, GeorgeTown University
---------------------------------------------------------------
Starts by saying that discussions with industry suggested that Higher Education is not seen as a good customer for commercial companies. A survey suggested that what people saw as problematic were
...
Going too fast, notes are about to stop... which is a shame because this is some really good stuff on business valuations. [Malcolm Gladwell's ideas make their first appearance, universities are full of Mavens quite well off for connectors...]
"O'reilly is the branding agent for Open Source"