LiMo Foundation Blog

In Part 1 of this 2 part series, we looked at the circumstances whereby an open source strategy would make sense, the reason why “open is free” is false notion, the importance of choosing the right open source development model, contribution strategy and the license that best suits  you.

Protect your reputation - don’t contribute bad code

Always remember you only have one reputation and while it takes a long time to build, it can vanish in seconds.  It is just as important to test and debug code contributions to the community as it is for internal releases.  Contribute buggy code and you will quickly be seen as a poor community member and your code may not be integrated into future baseline releases.  Other impacts may include your ability to attract the right talent to your business, especially if you are looking to hire from within the open source community or on your overall brand especially if software quality is an essential brand ingredient.  That said, releasing alpha and beta code is perfectly acceptable providing you make it clear that this is what it is and document the known issues.   So, keep it clean, protect your reputation and you’ll become a respected member of the community.

Identify the right business model

One of the common debates in open source is how to make money from it in a way that is acceptable to the community.  In our experience there are a wide range of valid business models that can happily co-exist with using open source software or indeed providing support services to those that are engaged with the community.

For example, a number of companies build full software distributions, usually based on Linux, that include a wide range of open source software but fully integrate it into a useable platform.   Normally consultancy, support, maintenance and adaptation services are provided around these distributions.  Many companies, including Teleca, provide integration services taking open source components and integrating them in product base lines. Relying on the base open source components to build value added products is frequently not realistic and therefore, services designed to provide customisation or extensions to these components are perfectly valid business models.  These are many examples of companies that are making a strong living from working with the open source community.

Appreciate that people don’t like to pay ransoms

While there are many valid business models, there are also business models that can alienate the open source community.  One such model is what we call asking people to pay ransoms – i.e. contributing core engines or components to an open source community with the intent of then making users dependent upon you for overly expensive customisation and extension services. The community will quickly reject this model and before long your components will have been removed from the baseline in favour of alternative contributions.  It can be surprising how fast the community can move when faced with being held to ransom.

Maintenance is NOT free

While there are many good justifications for making open source contributions, expecting free maintenance is not one of them as the basic dynamics of open source quickly underlines.  Most open source projects and communities rely on the goodwill of the members; be it on their personal time or sponsored by their employer.  However, you cannot contract with the community to provide SLAs for maintenance support, achieve commitments for defect analysis, fix bugs or set bug fix priorities. So my advice is simple - if you are delivering a commercial product or service then you need a simple maintenance plan to support your code.

Summary

Hopefully, the learning’s highlighted in this article will help you to develop an effective and rewarding model for leveraging and engaging with the open source community.  The core theme is simple, plan in advance and think through not just what software components you want to leverage but your overall engagement model with the wider community as the move to leverage open source has ramifications that ultimately touch many if not all areas of a business.