Thread: The 'Brave New World' of Open Source
Hi!
I have been in the computer industry since January 1967. So I’ve seen a lot of change – probably more than most people still actively involved today. That doesn’t make me any smarter, just persistent!
After the recent debate about commercialism within the PostgreSQL community, it got me thinking about how businesses should behave in the brave new world of open source. Here is a summary of how that debate influenced the direction of our business. I hope it is helpful to others and not thought off topic for this forum.
I decided that we needed to change our thinking at once:technologies to fit better within the open source world. There were two main reasons for this:
Having one foot in the commercial licensing camp and one in the open source camp leads to a ‘corporate split personality’. Our business model became much clearer when the focus changed to one approach. This doesn’t mean that we’ll drop commercial licences completely. There are developers using the once:radix platform who don’t want their applications released under the GPL. As a tools developer, we continue to support all ‘software religions’; though in time, I expect this to change. I’d be surprised to see commercial software licensing survive beyond the next decade.
When Microsoft goes open source, watch out!
The second motivation came to me just recently. I opened a Woolworths sales catalogue – something I seldom do. There, next to the kids’ pyjamas and cans of peaches, was a 1 TB disk drive selling for $139. It struck me that hardware and software had become a commodity. It is expertise, knowledge and skills that people are prepared to pay for. Why? To save time and frustration, to improve productivity/reduce costs, and to reduce risk.
We are releasing the new version of once:radix in the next couple of weeks. Given its unique position as the only browser-based Rapid Application Development environment, we hope this move will bring some direct benefit to the profile of PostgreSQL – the only database that we support.
Even more significantly, we are releasing our flagship ERP system – once:fabrik – as an open source project. This is NOT some lightweight application that lacks substantial value. It has been selling for $10,000–100,000 per site and is used in businesses ranging from SMEs to large corporations, banks and government departments.
For us to assist a business to install a system will come at a cost. But it will be substantially less than it has been. So why would we cut our margins and open the way for others to use our IP? In a commodity market, margins are reduced but volume increases dramatically. So instead of being a boutique software business, we hope to become a much larger training and support organisation.
The downside of growing market size is having to deal with the problems of managing a larger team of people. Call me crazy but I LIKE being small. The once:radix development team never exceeded six people. In a large organisation, it would have taken at least 60 to build it!
To grow without needing large amounts of capital and people, we hope to recruit independent ISVs and VARs to share the opportunities and the challenges.
This is the opportunity that the Brave New World of open source creates for small software developers.
Josh Berkus told me at OSCON 2007 that it would take time to develop our open source strategy. He was right. It has taken six years for our technology to reach maturity and two years for our business model. Is this another application of Moore’s Law?
Regards
Rob Napier
I have been in the computer industry since January 1967. So I’ve seen a lot of change – probably more than most people still actively involved today. That doesn’t make me any smarter, just persistent!
After the recent debate about commercialism within the PostgreSQL community, it got me thinking about how businesses should behave in the brave new world of open source. Here is a summary of how that debate influenced the direction of our business. I hope it is helpful to others and not thought off topic for this forum.
I decided that we needed to change our thinking at once:technologies to fit better within the open source world. There were two main reasons for this:
Having one foot in the commercial licensing camp and one in the open source camp leads to a ‘corporate split personality’. Our business model became much clearer when the focus changed to one approach. This doesn’t mean that we’ll drop commercial licences completely. There are developers using the once:radix platform who don’t want their applications released under the GPL. As a tools developer, we continue to support all ‘software religions’; though in time, I expect this to change. I’d be surprised to see commercial software licensing survive beyond the next decade.
When Microsoft goes open source, watch out!
The second motivation came to me just recently. I opened a Woolworths sales catalogue – something I seldom do. There, next to the kids’ pyjamas and cans of peaches, was a 1 TB disk drive selling for $139. It struck me that hardware and software had become a commodity. It is expertise, knowledge and skills that people are prepared to pay for. Why? To save time and frustration, to improve productivity/reduce costs, and to reduce risk.
We are releasing the new version of once:radix in the next couple of weeks. Given its unique position as the only browser-based Rapid Application Development environment, we hope this move will bring some direct benefit to the profile of PostgreSQL – the only database that we support.
Even more significantly, we are releasing our flagship ERP system – once:fabrik – as an open source project. This is NOT some lightweight application that lacks substantial value. It has been selling for $10,000–100,000 per site and is used in businesses ranging from SMEs to large corporations, banks and government departments.
For us to assist a business to install a system will come at a cost. But it will be substantially less than it has been. So why would we cut our margins and open the way for others to use our IP? In a commodity market, margins are reduced but volume increases dramatically. So instead of being a boutique software business, we hope to become a much larger training and support organisation.
The downside of growing market size is having to deal with the problems of managing a larger team of people. Call me crazy but I LIKE being small. The once:radix development team never exceeded six people. In a large organisation, it would have taken at least 60 to build it!
To grow without needing large amounts of capital and people, we hope to recruit independent ISVs and VARs to share the opportunities and the challenges.
This is the opportunity that the Brave New World of open source creates for small software developers.
Josh Berkus told me at OSCON 2007 that it would take time to develop our open source strategy. He was right. It has taken six years for our technology to reach maturity and two years for our business model. Is this another application of Moore’s Law?
Regards
Rob Napier
Rob, You should have a blog, really. -- Josh Berkus PostgreSQL Experts Inc. www.pgexperts.com