Trip Report: TSSJS Vegas
March 24th, 2007
Just got back from Vegas, where I participated on a panel about opensource and business at TheServerSide Java Symposium. It involved five of us from businesses that were related to opensource in some form. It did not include Geir Magnusson, who apparently had better things to do.
- Alfresco, John Newton
- JBoss, some guy with a beard and sandals
- SpikeSource, Joaquin Ruiz
- Interface21, Neelan Choksi
- Liferay, Brian Kim
Questions that Joe Ottinger and the audience threw at us ran the gamut from business strategy to licensing minutia. On the topic of how each contributes back to the community, JBoss, Interface21, and Liferay obviously employ developers, while SpikeSource primarily upstreams improvements, since they are basically just expert community members.
I think an audience member brought up the idea of the company “holding documentation hostage” for paying customers. Most everyone agreed that ultimately it depends on what you view your business as. If a company holds its docs hostage, someone else will ultimately create some competing docs. It might be the community. It could be a book publisher, who is an expert in creating fantastic docs and holding them hostage until you pay the cover price. That’s how O’Reilly, APress, Manning and other companies participate in opensource.
One audience question involved how to define success in an opensource company. Once again, we all seemed to violently agree that success is defined just as for any other company. Profit! It’s a dirty but true secret. Companies try to make profits. Opensource is just a method of software development, not a complete business model.
The issue of trademarks did arise. I’m not going to poke the bear here, but company counsel has replied on some of the other blogs out there.
On a different note, I finally got to meet Hani Suleiman, Ross Mason and Mike Cannon-Brookes in person. I ran into Dan Diephouse, Dion Almaer, Jonas Bonér and Geert Bevin again.
Only lost $90 on the slots between me and my wife.
March 24th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
(Not having been there, but) I think your context was wrong on the success of an open source company question.
In and of itself, success of any company is profit. Although thinking about companies I’ve worked at in the past it seems that few companies are in the profit market, their more concerned about share price or an event like selling the company. It’s the small privately owned company who focus solely on profit.
I think the question was most likely asked related to the community. In our eyes, what will make an open (source) company a success?
It’s obvious what won’t.
* Providing no value to its surrounding community.
* Being considered evil by its surrounding community (The fun of http://bill.dudney.net/roller/bill/entry/1).
In our eyes a company could be a success even if it went under. Was Virtuas a success to the open communities it was involved with? It’s not a question you can say ‘No’ to just because it went under. Even dead companies leave a legacy, and this is especially true in the world of open source where the source code outlives the company.
—
There’s a problem with all of my comments above. They accept that there is such a thing as an ‘open source company’. There isn’t, it’s a media term. What there is, in this new century of ours, is an empowered community. Companies have always had to worry about whether they were providing value to their community and not being perceived as evil, but nowadays the community is far more powerful than once it was and all companies, be they sugar producers, arms manufacturers or operating systems creators have to worry strongly about these things.
(and hey we didn’t need Trade Unions filled with power, we just needed to lessen the cost and decouple the lines of communicating to put the power in the hands of the people)
The question should have been:
“What value does our community (TSS readers in this case) place on companies who are a part of our community?”
This works nicely with your diagrams a while back in which the community contained the company. What’s the rent the community is charging on them. What’s the price for all of these people to accept the company as one of them. Otherwise you have a new diagram, and it shows a big green faded (50% alpha channel) representing the community on the left, and a small blue solid blob on the right representing the company, and the two are going their own separate ways.
Communities can reject their symbiotes and declare them parasites.
March 24th, 2007 at 10:58 pm
“* Being considered evil by its surrounding community (The fun of http://bill.dudney.net/roller/bill/entry/1).”
If you read the comments there, that was de-fused by Mark W the general counsel. This is basic Trademark 101 stuff. You can use the name of anything, just in a way that respects the trademark.
http://michaelneale.blogspot.com/2007/03/trademark-hyperbole.html
March 26th, 2007 at 9:41 am
Agreed Michael. It wasn’t a verdict on my part but a current example. Apache do the same kind of thing, and receive less flak, I wonder why? Is it simply because a company have to work harder to not seem evil than a non-profit of coders?