Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Mudblood open source

January 31, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Mudblood open source

TAGS: Open Source

I talked with a prominent open source developer - Gianugo Rabellino of Apache/Cocoon fame - today, getting his feedback on the business models of Red Hat, Alfresco, MySQL, SugarCRM, JBoss, and others. He made it clear that the open source development community (if it, in fact, exists) strongly prefers pureplay open source projects, rather than "mudblood" open source companies.

No surprises there.

I then spoke to a group of architects (quite senior) from Fortune 500 companies at a recent OSDL advisory meeting. I asked them the same question: do you care if your software is open and, if so, how open is open? Almost universally, I was told that everything should be 100% open (and they then gave some good reasons as to how this would influence their decisions). They even said they'd pay for it, but I didn't believe them on that one, human nature being what it is. :-)

What wasn't clear to me in either conversation is how to quantify community involvement. None of the companies above made the pureblood cut, and yet all are making healthy revenues. Is this because each is a sell-out? Profitable sell-outs, but sell-outs nonetheless?

His suggestions?

• Hire a prominent open source developer. Google did this with Greg Stein (and Chris DiBona). Novell did it by acquiring Ximian (with Nat and Miguel as part of the package). I'm not convinced that these or other developer-hires did much for the top lines of these companies, but certainly Nat's and Miguel's involvement with Novell gave it a revived freshness (which now only real revenues can sustain).

• Actively participate in relevant open source communities. Alfresco, for one, has been doing this, but I think we could be doing better. And maybe MySQL could have benefited from more active InnoDB involvement...? :-) I know that RightNow actively contributes code to the HtDig project, as well as bug fixes to MySQL, too. Is this enough to make these companies "pure?"

• Open up all of one's source code. No "baitware," he said. So, no RHEL vs. Fedora, Community vs. Enterprise, etc. This sounds great in principle, and I admit to being biased toward openness in software, but I'm not convinced that the developer community that Red Hat lost by moving to the RHEL/Fedora split was not more than made up by the committed developers and customers it gained as a result.

And so, the question: does community matter? Or, rather, does the pureblood development community matter?

As I've written before, of the top 50 contributors to SugarCRM's development community, 95% are SugarCRM partners. Are they tapping into the pureblood open source developers? Maybe not. Are they tapping into an audience that matters and actively contributes? Yes.

Despite my apparent assurance on the matter, I'm anything but convinced by my arguments. If you have any ideas on how open "open source" should be, please ping me.

Posted by Matt Asay on January 31, 2006 08:22 AM

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