How does one move from a traditional software model to an Open Source model?

Recently, I had an opportunity to meet with Murugan Pal, founder and CTO of SpikeSource. We discussed various topics relating to Open Source. Two areas of particular interest were around Pricing Model and Migration steps. Murugan promised to summarize his thoughts in his blog, take a look at http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/8510.

At first glance the migration steps Murugan outlined seemed a little overwhelming especially if one has hundreds of thousands of lines of code, however, Murugan was quick to point out that the code need not be perfect. He is of the opinion that if you take the approach of being open, honest and willing to clearly document areas of code that need cleanup/work, Open Source developers will still embrace you. The steps as outlined by Murugan make a lot of sense. Anyone serious about the Open Source model will find his write up very useful.

In my next posting, I'll share my discussions with someone involved with Actuate's open source initiative, BIRT (http://www.eclipse.org/birt/) and perhaps someone close to SugarCRM and Alfresco. The next few weeks are really busy with travel to Bangalore, Chicago etc., but hopefully i will be able to get a couple of postings in before the end of the year.

Excellent perspective on benefits of Open Source...

Interesting editorial by Larry Augustin, founder and Chairman of the Board of VA Software, creator of SourceForge.net and board member of SugarCRM.

What really grabbed my attention is his comment that savings in sales & marketing could be closer to 75 percent. This is huge!!!

I was skeptical on how much core R&D leverage can be expected from an Open Source community. Larry's comment that there is little community leverage developing the core of the app addresses my question. It makes sense that the leverage tends to come from testing, bug fixes and interface/integration code. I would add internationalization to the mix as well.

The biggest benefit on the R&D side is the reduction in time to market. Companies with offshore development models have been able to squeeze out a lot of their R&D costs, however, the big drawback with offshore development is the long turnaround times. Startups using Open Source components have been able to quickly pull together applications (using onshore or offshore resources) in a much shorter timeframe. Given the pace at which innovation is occuring today, i think the reduced time to market benefit makes the Open Source model a natural fit for many startups.

I'll be tracking Larry's next piece on "The Next Wave of Open Source, why the application market is ripe for open source offerings - and which applications will gain traction the fastest." I'm really looking forward to his next article.

Shai Agassi & SAP on Open Source...

Interesting perspective on Open Source from Shai Agassi, SAP Exec Board Member in charge of Product and Technology Group . For those of you who don't have the time to read the entire article, Shai's has clearly expressed his commitment to the Open Source movement. He sees it providing openness of source code for customers, developers, partners etc.; enabling innovation while protecting the author's ownership of the source code and offering commodity component stacks such as LAMP.

Next, it will be interesting to hear the perspective from innovators involved with Open Source startups. Obviously they don't have to worry about existing customers as SAP does and are highly motivated to create disruptive changes.

Open source dilemma - Part II

Picking up where i left off regarding open source, the second big question is around the contribution of an open source community wrt fixes, enhancements and changes to core pieces of functionality of a business application. While the open source community has done phenomenal work in the infrastructure space, is it reasonable to expect the same level of contribution when it comes to open source business application software?

Recently, i came across Alfresco (www.alfresco.org), an open source content management community. To be honest, at first glance their product looks pretty darn good. I'm seriously interested in playing with it and perhaps even evaluating it for use inhouse. The functionality as described in the product management web page of Alfresco's commercial website is definitely impressive. Given the nature of a content repository and its similarities to a database system, it appears to lend itself to a open source development model. However, it also has several characteristics that make it somewhat similar to a traditional business application software, especially its features such as workflows, reporting etc.

In my mind, the real success especially for an open source business application software is in building a community of developers that not only contribute by internationalizing the software and checking in simple add-ons but in really extending the core system by adding additional modules and core functional capabilities. What would be even more compelling is if the community consists of members from organizations that are end consumers of the software, not intermediaries looking to resell the software for profit.

Now that i have laid it out, i intend to actually talk to some of the pioneers and share with you what i find out. Check back in a week to learn more!

Open source dilemma - Part I

With open source gaining widespread acceptance, the dilemma for most of us who don't clearly see a solid business model based on an open source model is really around risk and payback. The temptation of seeing a huge number of downloads of your newly open sourced software is enticing but not knowing how many real commercial opportunities and deals it would boil down to is where the real challenge lies. In the traditional direct or channel sales model, it is (to a certain extent) possible to predict the outcome of your sales efforts. In the new world of open source, especially when it comes to business application software, its unclear who would shell out dollars to upgrade from the free bee version to the commercial version. If any of you open source pioneers out there is listening, i would love to hear about your success stories. I'm not interested in stories from the Apache and JBoss types, i'm more curious to hear from those of you focused on business application software.

This is just one of the aspects of open sources that is intriguing. The other is the true benefit from the open source community. Well, i'm going to hold this topic for my next posting :-)