Comments on: Commercial Open Source Software – Caveat Emptor

By: KeithCu

KeithCu — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:22:53 +0000

Open core is a very interesting thing. But I don’t think it works. It creates tensions such as pointed out in the article (what should be put in the free versus premium version), and you need the free community before you can even do the freemium. Supposed Fedora is killed by Ubuntu, doesn’t that threaten RHEL as well? I believer there are cases where the move to freemium has hurt the free product. Xen was the hottest thing at one point, and basically disappeared when they moved to an open core. I see it is now moved back to 100% free again, but many are now using KVM or VirtualBox.

By: Georg C. F. Greve (greve) 's status on Monday, 09-Nov-09 17:47:39 UTC - Identi.ca

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:47:44 +0000

[...] http://blogs.gartner.com/brian_prentice/2009/11/09/commercial-open-source-software-caveat-emptor/ a few seconds ago from Choqok [...]

By: Matt Asay

Matt Asay — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:45:27 +0000

Good analysis, Brian, though I do think you overlook the importance of source code availability to a surprisingly large swath of customers. No, not everyone wants to muck around in the code, but I’m constantly surprised by how many *do* get into the code. This is something that is possible with COSS but not proprietary (including Shared Source like Microsoft pitches).

The only difference between full open source and the proprietary extensions you note is that “proprietary” for these COSS vendors means no redistribution of code (but they can still view and modify source). That turns out to be a big, material difference, especially as more companies look to COSS vendors to provide platforms for internal development.