Today, if you’re building a new product or service, open source software is likely playing a role. But many entrepreneurs and product managers still struggle with how to build a successful business purely on open source.
The big secret of a successful open source business is that “it’s about way more than the code,” says John Mark Walker, a well-known voice in the open source world with extensive expertise in open source product, community, and ecosystem creation at Red Hat and Dell EMC. “In order to build a certified, predictable, manageable product that ‘just works,’ it requires a lot more effort than just writing good code.”
It requires a solid understanding of open source business models and the expertise and management skills to take advantage of developing your products in an open source way.
In a new eBook, Building a Business on Open Source, The Linux Foundation has partnered with Walker to distill what it takes to create and manage a product or service built on open source software. It starts with an overview of the various business models, then covers the business value of the open source platform itself, and describes how to create a successful open source product and manage the software supply chain behind it.
“If you’re developing software in an open source way, you have options that proprietary developers don’t have,” Walker writes. “You can deliver better software more efficiently that is more responsive to customer needs — if you do it well and apply best practices.”
The Value of the Open Source Platform
As open source has become more prevalent, it has changed the way products are developed. Walker describes the unique challenges and questions raised by adopting an open source approach, including questions of sustainability, accountability, and monetization.
Walker admits that Red Hat remains the only company that has been successful with a pure open source business model (without being acquired). Many companies are still pursuing a similar model selling open source software, but other models around open source exist, including the venture-capitalist’s favorite open core model, a services and support model, and a hybrid model that mixes open source code with proprietary components.
In discussing the difference between open core and hybrid business models, Walker says his biggest problem with them is that they both assume there is no intrinsic value in the platform itself.
“I am not discounting the added value of proprietary software on top of open source platforms; I am suggesting that the open source platforms themselves are inherently valuable and can be sold as products in their own right, if done correctly,” Walker states.