Stormy's Corner

Kim Weins is the Senior VP of Marketing at OpenLogic. Kim spent three years as a principal in CMO Strategy Group and
helped companies such as Atomz (acquired by WebSideStory), TuVox and
RedSeal to significantly accelerate their marketing efforts. Prior to
CMO Strategy Group, she was at PeopleSoft where she was responsible for
driving PeopleSoft's CRM business strategy.

I had lunch with Kim Weins from OpenLogic. We had an interesting
discussion about open source companies and how they can either dominate
or foster communities. In addition, we also talked about what it's like
for an open source software developer to work for an open source
company. She works with many open source developers on a contract basis
as well as many open source companies on a partner basis. Her insights
were interesting.

Kim, "open source companies" come in many types and flavors – how do you
characterize them?

We
see
two main variations of open source companies – differentiated by the
level of ownership and control over their IP. This level of control is
important, because it tends to
drive their business models.

The
first type what I’ll call “IP owners”. These are companies that
own and control all of the IP that goes into the open source product. This
would include companies like MySQL, Alfresco, SugarCRM, etc. These companies
typically have some variation of a dual licensing business model that requires
that they control all of the IP in order to license an “enterprise version”
of the product in the way they want – often not under an open source
license. For these types of companies, typically only employees can commit
changes to the project since the company wants to maintain control of the IP. In
some cases, the companies may allow contributions by outside committers, as
long as the developer gives IP
rights to the company.

The
second type is what I’ll call “non IP owners”. This type of
open source company typically builds up around an existing open source project
that has many committers. The IP is owned by the open source developers or by a third party such as the Apache
Foundation. Examples of this type of company would include Enterprise DB,
Acquia, or Red Hat (around Linux). Since the company often does not own or
control the core IP for the project, the business model changes. These
companies typically either sell support and services around the project or
create add on functionality that they can then license. Often the companies
will hire some or all of the committers on the projects, but typically the
projects are open to contributors and committers outside the company to
participate. However, there are
some cases where these companies try to gain control over the IP by hiring all
of the committers so that they can determine the direction the project takes.

While it's great that developers can
get hired to work on their project, sometimes it seems like the open source
company hires everyone in order to
control the product. Can an open source company hire too much of the community?

When the
developers working on a project are
limited to people employed by one company, it eliminates a huge part of the
value of open source development. The
ability to build new capabilities is then limited to what can be funded by one
company – just like for proprietary software. Although some open source
companies would argue that they help to support and fund the project in this
way, the reality is that they also gain control. If their sole interest was in
supporting and funding the project, they would open up to committers outside
the company in order to improve the project more quickly.

Many open source software developers
do quite a bit of contracting or consulting work, like for OpenLogic's Expert
Community. Does working for an open source company make that easier or harder
for them?

We work
with the OpenLogic Expert Community on a contract basis. They are not
employees of OpenLogic, but we pay them for the work they do to help support
our customers. This allows them to continue to work on other projects (whether
for pay or volunteer) as they see fit. However,
in recruiting these open source developers,
we find many cases where their employer, whether a proprietary or open source
company, tries to limit their ability to work on open source (whether for pay
or volunteer). Companies do this through employment agreements that
specifically limit a developers
ability to work on outside projects, either by requiring IP assignment of
anything they develop to their
employers or by explicitly forbidding certain kinds of outside work. These
restrictions may make it harder for developers
to participate in the open source community as they see fit.

Do companies often foster open source developers?
i.e. if you want to get going working in open source software, is getting a job
with an open source company a good way to get started?

In some
cases, companies do foster open source developers.
However, the companies that do so
by trying to tie developers hands
are doing a disservice to the developers,
the open source community, and eventually
themselves. When going to work for an open source or proprietary company, open
source developers need to be careful
to negotiate the freedoms that are important to them – such as having the
right to work on other open source products and the ability to retain IP rights
in the work they do.

As well as the ability to work on non-related open source software projects in their free time!

Can you give an example of a company that you think is doing a really good job
of working with the community or maintaining an independent community?

I would
cite two examples that represent how companies can be successful while
maintaining an open community. The first would be RedHat around Linux development. Linux is not controlled by any one
company – rather it is contributed to by multiple vendors as well as
independent developers. Obviously full
credit for this can’t go to RedHat, since they need to work within the
constraints of how the Linux project is structured, but they have done a good
job of demonstrating that you can make money and be  successful without
controlling the IP.  It remains to be seen if that same model will be true for
JBoss.

The second
example would be Mozilla around Firefox. Mozilla has developed
a business model that seems to work without limiting community involvement.

Many companies have open source products but not an external open source
community, what benefits of open source software do you think they are missing
out on?

There
are several benefits of open source,
but some of the most important benefits come from having a broad, diverse and
open community. By doing so, there are economies of scale by sharing the development and maintenance efforts. There is also a
breadth of requirements and a breadth of technical solutions that may be
limited when all developers are
internal to the company. Companies that don’t stay open to a community
that extends beyond their employees will really be returning to some of the
limitations of proprietary software.

Thanks, Kim.

Anybody else, thoughts to share on open source companies, communities and employment?

Disclaimers: I used to work at OpenLogic and I still occasionally do some writing
and consulting for them. OpenLogic pays open source software community members to support
open source software projects on an issue by issue basis for Global 2000
companies. I approached Kim about doing this interview.

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