Don’t Let the Tail Wag the Dog
In recent months, the debate on so-called “open source business models” has begun to rage once again, thanks to recent moves from Mongo, Redis Labs, and Confluent. Taken individually, each situation presents unique characteristics that warrant further analysis without jumping to conclusions about each entity. Taken together, however, the sum total of their individual acts presents a clear trend: movement by companies that build products on open source software towards a more proprietary approach. While each case is different, they have in essence declared that an open source approach is inadequate for generating enough revenue to yield return on investment sought by their investors. I believe that this is because the emergence of the open source business model as a distinct class pushes companies that adopt it into a narrow-banded decision matrix that presents limited options for future changes if the need to pivot arises.
To be clear, there are a variety of ways to capitalize on open source software in a commercial setting, but there is no separate open source business model, and to pursue such is to possibly limit your future success.
Open Core 1.0
In order to investigate the movement towards proprietary solutions, let’s look…
