Daniel Chalef

Optaros, Gartner and the meaning of commercial open source

I mentioned recently that KnowledgeTree has been listed in the 2007 Optaros Open Source Catalogue and how I was interested in the mechanisms used by Optaros to rate open source projects. Through an introduction made by Stephen Walli, I got chatting to Dave Gynn from Optaros. Dave and I had a great chat about the catalogue and the challenges Optaros faced in putting it together. The catalogue itself is an enormous undertaking: SourceForge.Net has over 140 000 registered projects and many open source projects exist outside of the SourceForge.Net family, adding to that number.

As Dave mentions on his blog, Optaros grappled with how to represent commercial open source vendors in the catalogue. One of the ideas they mooted was to present the commercial edition of the software separate to the open source edition, but with the commercial edition showing a significantly lower community scoring. [I’ve mentioned open source and commercial editions here: you may find this primer on commercial open source business models put together by Dave’s colleague, Seth Gottlieb, useful in understanding this.]

I think rating the two elements of a commercial open source product separately would be a mistake: divorcing the community from commercial editions of commercial open source software doesn’t reflect the reality of how community and customer benefit from each other:

• With tiered-functionality business models, the community is a driver of stability and innovation for both the open source and the commercial editions of the software.
• Commercial customers provide a means of investing in some of the less sexy functionality that business applications require: functionality that is least likely to see community investment.
• Commercial customers are also a strong force for product leadership, with larger commercial entities investing in providing best practice which is captured within the application. Even if some of these features are only available in the commercial edition to begin with, vendors often “commoditize” these features in to the open source edition of their software as new functionality to the commercial edition is added. Smaller organizations or those disinterested in moving from community or open source relationship to a supported one thus benefit from the commercial customer’s investment.

Many analysts and organizations evaluating commercial open source software (and the open source community at large) are grappling with what commercial open source means to them. How may they license the application? What organization (and support) backs the product? What do they pay for? The Optaros catalogue is designed to provide guidance to business decision makers on these issues. I’m hoping that as the catalogue becomes somewhat “richer” in content that the depth of coverage around commercial open source will increase. Commercial open source business models are proving that they have traction (and not just in the investor community!). Optaros has made a good go at it first time round and I look forward to future revisions.

Allied to this topic, a recently published Gartner paper, “Commercial Open Source: Is All That Glitters Usually Sold?”, covers commercial open source from a purchasing perspective. The guys at Gartner polled our thinking around tiering KnowledgeTree functionality and the business model behind the KnowledgeTree product. Whilst I don’t entirely agree with the conclusions made about what commercial open source means to a CIO it is an interesting read.