Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Adding risk into the commercial open source buying equation (Savio)

May 30, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Adding risk into the commercial open source buying equation (Savio)

TAGS: Open Source

Good post by Savio Rodrigues of IBM/Geronimo fame. (I finally had the pleasure of meeting Savio at OSBC last week. Great guy, though he doesn't play football nearly as well as his compatriots. :-)

Savio walks through how risk enters into the buying calculus, playing off Marten Mickos' contention that open source buyers are those that are willing to trade money to save time/resources. Savio adds risk to the equation and elaborates on how it could affect JBoss now that it is being deployed in the RHEL/Fedora model:

This is where risk comes into play. Keep in mind that the JBoss “Community Edition” will include the latest features, some of which won’t make it to the JBoss “RHEL” version or may be dropped from future JBoss “Community Edition” versions. JBoss is clear that backwards compatibility isn’t guaranteed with JBoss “Community Edition”.

If you’re a customer that wants to spend time to save money, and you’re somewhat risk averse, than you don’t like using a product with features that may disappear in the future. You have the option of buying JBoss “RHEL” and getting backwards compatibility. You can also look elsewhere for an application server solution.

Taking Risk into consideration is likely the #1 reason that an OSS user will turn into an OSS paying customer.

Good analysis, Savio. How can we get you to blog over here on Open Sources? ;-)

Posted by Matt Asay on May 30, 2007 01:06 PM

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