Open Source Business Models: making money & playing by the “rules”
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00:00
Data modelPC CardOpen sourceUtility softwareMilitary baseGroup actionOpen sourceSoftwareText editorSource codeAndroid (robot)Projective planeDecision theoryCharacteristic polynomialMathematicsModulare ProgrammierungPhysical systemECosSpeech synthesisTerm (mathematics)FreewareGeometryQuicksortLecture/Conference
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Streaming mediaOpen sourceNumbering schemeStructural loadFood energyOpen setSoftwareoutputSoftwareElectric power transmissionOpen sourceMereologyQuicksortSlide ruleGroup actionStandard deviationGoodness of fitPoint (geometry)Planning
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ConsistencyAndroid (robot)Gateway (telecommunications)Open sourceGoogolFormal languageProduct (business)Data modelOpen setService (economics)BuildingEnterprise architectureOnline helpComputer programmingDesign by contractShared memoryEvolutionarily stable strategyWordCore dumpSoftware as a serviceComponent-based software engineeringDecision tree learningPay televisionOnline helpGoogolProduct (business)Open sourceGeometryWeb 2.0PlanningOffice suiteData modelLevel (video gaming)Computer-assisted translationBuildingProjective planeEnterprise architectureMereologyService (economics)Component-based software engineeringSoftware maintenanceWordPower (physics)Core dumpPoint cloudSoftwareNumberSoftware frameworkCuboidQuicksortRight angleSoftware developerInternet service providerMetreText editorMultiplication signComa BerenicesData centerSpacetimeOperating systemRevision controlFormal languageVapor barrierSinc functionElectronic mailing listUniform resource locatorValue-added networkOpen setFreewareComputer animation
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CodeRule of inferencePhysical systemECosOpen sourceQueue (abstract data type)MereologyCore dumpRule of inferenceShared memoryOnline helpCodeComputer animation
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Rule of inferenceCodeCore dumpHexagonOpen sourceTwitterOpen setPay television10 (number)Open sourceService (economics)Strategy gameCloud computingCASE <Informatik>Multiplication signInstance (computer science)Interface (computing)CodeConfluence (abstract rewriting)MereologyComputer programProjective planeFreewareQuicksortData modelValue-added networkUtility softwareAdditionRevision controlServer (computing)Level (video gaming)GeometryComponent-based software engineeringSoftwareRight angleHexagonOnline helpMultiplicationProduct (business)NeuroinformatikPhysical systemECos2 (number)Enterprise architectureFlow separationSource codeArithmetic meanDesign by contractFormal languageScaling (geometry)BuildingCellular automatonComputer animation
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Public domainGreatest elementOpen setSoftware testingOpen sourceFreewareData modelVariety (linguistics)AreaPolygonMedical imagingFacebookInstance (computer science)Core dumpDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Revision controlBitSoftware developerSimilarity (geometry)Exterior algebraOpen sourceLevel (video gaming)Term (mathematics)Elasticity (physics)SoftwareCloud computingCASE <Informatik>MultiplicationOpen setProduct (business)Projective planeTouchscreenQuicksortBlogBusiness modelMultiplication signFrequencyCommitment schemeDisk read-and-write headControl flowSequelGoogle Street ViewComputer animation
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QuicksortDatabasePhysical systemOpen setBusiness modelSoftwareFacebookCASE <Informatik>Mereology1 (number)FrequencyMultiplication signSpacetimeOpen sourceCloud computingPosition operatorAreaBlogExterior algebraProduct (business)Slide ruleCore dumpProjective planeDigital electronicsMappingGoodness of fitAxiom of choiceRight angleVector potentialPower (physics)Plug-in (computing)OracleDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Sign (mathematics)CircleOrder (biology)Lecture/Conference
25:07
Open sourceFreewareVariety (linguistics)Data model
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:07
Hello, so Software is created by a group of people that group of people may include commercial businesses that sponsor open source projects there's generally an executive editor someone who makes the decisions about who commits and what gets committed and
00:26
very importantly the soft source code is freely available to both use and Change if you want to do it yourself, and there's many very well known software packages that are open source Linux Mozilla patchy Android Mongo QGIS, etc, etc
00:46
the other unique characteristics are it's governed by an open license, which defines the terms of what you can and can't do with it and then generally The software is available free of monetary charges and as Richard Solomon
01:05
Has said But even though it's free think of it more as in freedom free speech Not as in free beer there as with all software there are costs whether it's training whether it's deploying etc Etc and therein lies some of the opportunity
01:23
And opens our software has become big business all of the sponsors on this For this conference are extremely important, but I've Highlighted in red, you know, very large companies billion-dollar businesses that are involved and supporting open source software and
01:43
You know in past phosphor G conferences other very large companies IBM Digital Globe Bing Trimble Etc have been monetary sponsors of these conferences and Sort of the mother of all giant big business Activities was the recent sale of Red Hat whose business is open source by IBM for
02:06
34 billion US US dollars. So there's a lot of money around the ecosystem of open source and I'll be talking about open source is Generally not just specifically for geos geospatial. I Was at a conference in
02:23
Seattle Washington by General Electric and it wasn't a geospatial conference It wasn't an open source conference. It was a you to an electric utility conference one of General Electric's biggest consumer bases is Selling software to people who run power grids etc
02:42
And I was kind of surprised during their plenary session in front of the whole group in two separate slides They go out of their way to talk about use of open source software Embracing open source technologies and It sort of occurred to me that that's part of the point open source has become a good thing
03:01
It's become a standard thing that companies want to align themselves with whether they're in the software business or not. It's viewed as Having some credibility in the technology world if you understand and utilize open source Another example of a large company that has embraced open source is Google
03:23
If you go to this URL open source dot google.com You'll find a list of literally hundreds of open source initiatives that they host Some of them are very large and well-known Android kubernetes the go language the angular JavaScript framework and
03:40
One of the other things they do is they support conferences whether it's Linux conference or phosphor G I'm Google has been the most consistent largest sponsor. I And has supported every conference as gold or silver since Barcelona in 2010
04:02
So there are lots of ways of support supporting open source There are three main commerce models, and I'm going to go into a little more detail on each of them But first is providing value-added services and support to the open source projects themselves. You know we can all go to the gym But sometimes you need a little extra push a little extra help from your personal trainer to do it right to get the exercise, right?
04:26
to Leveraging or incorporating open source technologies as an ingredient to your product sort of powered by open source But you've created something that's commercial or that you want to Get reimbursed for and then third is actually open sourcing your commercial technology and
04:42
Leveraging it into a freemium kind of offering So Providing value-added services It's kind of the Red Hat model provide services that support the open source projects help enterprises with adoption help enterprises Deploy and support the technology for the long haul So you know again?
05:01
It's free as in freedom not as in free beer there are costs and maintaining software even open source software the cost and deploying it right there costs and improving the software when you need to and another very important part is And a benefit of open source software is if something is missing You can hire someone who knows the open source project to improve it or add the feature and that gets done frequently
05:24
So one way of looking at is sort of in some models open source is a base foundation that everyone uses But you pay to finish it off. Maybe to construct the house or maintain maintain the building for the long run
05:40
Leveraging or incorporating open source Technology to deliver products so again You know if your product has lots of parts many cogs one of your cogs may be a phosphor g component phosphor g project So it's kind of the notion of powered by open source So you're basically using open source and creating value around it or open source is helping you solve a problem
06:05
but maybe it's not all of the pieces of your problem and It's hard to find many of the cloud products that aren't using Fos free and open software in some way or another Core capabilities the operating system Linux, which you know Google's power data centers are powered by Linux
06:24
So it's part of their offering Postgres WordPress for for web activities, and then there's more niche capabilities like the geo stuff post GIS or GDAL etc and You know you need to make sure that the license that you're using The open source license allows the commercial activity to build around it and embed and incorporate and again other examples
06:47
you know our platinum sponsor geocat is building product powered by open source initiatives Cardo mapbox and again the Google example of the employing Linux and the data centers
07:02
And then there's open sourcing your commercial technology So basically you build something that you may sell but you declare that it's open source Sometimes and we'll talk about this a little more. It's just for for the love of sharing what you've done other times It's it's about the money lowers barriers to adoption it's free to download and play with it's easier to get started and
07:27
Maybe you even attract contributors who like your software and help make it better over the long haul But I've been reading lately a lot of it is about the freemium model and I took this quote from an article
07:40
I'll give you the title of the article a little later The approach is usually develop features that you include in a basic product basic product is entirely free and open and then users like it and get familiar with the free version and They start to pay for advanced features that are added above and beyond what may be in the open source base
08:05
MongoDB is an example leaflet Was an open source by mapbox, but they hired the main Executive editor and committer and so they continued to invest in the development of leaflet Hadoop was open source by Yahoo
08:20
as an example, so in my titles Making money but playing by the rules. So what are the rules and this is my take on the rules There's no official rules anywhere. But you know giving back and sharing is the core rule You want should be part of the community. You should understand the licenses. You should understand how the ecosystem works
08:43
no, nobody likes anyone who's just taking taking taking part of open source is giving back and Appreciating what's been given to you and you can give back in many ways you can contribute code You can contribute documentation. I was at the QGIS session. They were really Earlier and they were asking people please help contribute to the documentation of QGIS help
09:05
contribute to Documentation in multiple languages, etc. You can contribute your time to the computer to the community For example all the work Facilien kadrina and the whole team are doing is a way of giving back to the open source that they that they use as
09:23
Well, I do that in a small way I'm on the program committee for this conference Or you can contribute money directly to a project or foundation or to a company that supports a phosphor G project You can hire someone who's in the ecosystem to create a new feature The new feature then becomes part of the open source project
09:43
So, you know, don't forget hit the support QGIS button the thousand people Contribute five dollars a year. That's five thousand dollars So what does my company do again my company Thermopylae was bought by hexagon in
10:01
February of this year and We've do several things and one things I've been doing is meeting some of the other people at hexagon who are involved in Doing things with open source. So one thing we do is Google deprecated Google Earth Enterprise, which is a product that we resold to people had a lot of customers
10:24
But instead of throwing away the code they open source the code and our company now manages that project Small community of contributors and and we maintain the github in the website Check it out if you're interested and we oh by the way, yes We do sell an advanced version that's supported and has additional features
10:47
Hexagon Utilizes geo server and map server for their imagery streaming service and has contracted with companies One of the sponsors geo solutions to build some add-ons to geo server that are optimized for large-scale imagery streaming and those end up in the code base and
11:06
then also Incorporating phosphoryl components into professional services work hexagon does a lot of work with companies Deploying all kinds of software and sometimes Phos4g tools are the right tools to do that and it sits alongside or interfaces with commercial trip
11:25
commercial technology So how do we give back in the first case? We manage the code base and the second base we contribute money to people who are managing and contributing and building the code base And in the third instance we can contribute our time
11:42
In this year's case to the program committee and to supporting this conference with two people attending and paying the full price so Here's here's kind of the tricky part And some of the lack of full definition of what it takes means to be giving back
12:04
So Amazon has been in the news for some of the wrong reasons with open source where they're Companies that have The freemium model and have a free base package and then they sell the advanced features and then this instance
12:21
cockroach labs Was concerned that Amazon might do what they've done in other situations where they've taken Elasticsearch and added their own features when there was another company that was already adding those same features or a patchy cough Confluent
12:41
Puts add up value-added services on top of it and it's sort of you know as the CEO of cockroach said there's very little protection if a company with Amazon's resources becomes dedicated to Re-implementing your enterprise features. So they're taking open source projects that other companies have built a commerce ecosystem around and they're just copying it and then selling it as a service and
13:05
people are taking notice and Some of them including cockroach are changing their license so the cloud providers can't do that if they want to do it It's fine, but then they should pay a license back
13:21
MongoDB is another example of this that was in the news and Again, you know comes back to some things that Amazon is or isn't doing and basically their CEO was just brutally honest Say we open source as a freemium strategy to drive adoption. That's why they that's why they did the open source and
13:42
You know why he could have said it more nicely People in the community appreciated the the honesty, but it also laid open some hypocrisy About their stance against Amazon, which I'll talk about in a second So, you know, there's there's difference in motives of why you might open source something
14:05
So Yahoo open sourcing Hadoop or Facebook open sourcing Cassandra You know, they did it for this kind of reason. Hey, we built something that's interesting. It's not really core to what we do So we're putting it out there and maybe people will like it. Maybe we'll get more committers and people will help improve it
14:26
So in that instance they want other people to contribute But Mongo was different Mongo was open-sourced to drive adoption and It's absolutely core to their business It's not just something one of many tools that they use
14:44
Crunchy data is a little similar Postgres SQL is core to its business, but they didn't develop Postgres SQL. They built up around it so kind of the the I the idea Is if it's not core to the business, you're more likely to be interested in contributors if it's core to the business
15:07
You might be more interested in getting Consumers to use it and explore it and eventually adopt it so It's complicated and while these articles beat up on
15:23
Amazon a bit there's another side to the story that's good journalism and essentially says on the other hand Mongo says we don't think it's reasonable for a cloud vendor to come in and take a free version to monetize it and not give anything back But gee when Amazon for example has tried to commit to to Mongo. They haven't been welcomed
15:45
They've been rebuffed Mongo wants to do all the innovation itself And that was the hypocrisy in the first quote and then you know Amazon's defense in the in the cockroach lab situation is
16:01
AWS has over the years contributed to many open-source projects. We are a good giving back citizen in general and in Talking about the elastic search thing AWS in a blog Said they justified the move by claiming that elastic search had mixed too much proprietary software in its free software
16:20
I don't really know what that means, but there are enough on the defensive to be trying to explain what's going on so Before wrapping up just want to sort of look ahead to something that you know landed on my radar screen in in Dar es Salaam
16:41
Which was Facebook talking about OpenStreetMap and it's sort of big business has been involved in open software for a long time It's getting bigger and bigger Now are there opportunities to commercialize? Open data or Invest in open data to make the commercial products better and Facebook is doing some interesting stuff
17:04
They're investing in making data better largely in very populated places like Indonesia and Thailand Where the data was poor, but there are lots of people lots of people who use Facebook And then they also because they have an image to protect
17:24
Wanted to help OSM get rid of vandalism, you know people will create streets with nasty names people made Polygons of lakes that spelled out something Vulgar, etc, etc But it seems to me to be a win-win OSM wins with big
17:42
Contributions of more and better data and Facebook wins because they're creating something that's going to be useful to their users So what else is coming and you know one of things I heard Earlier this week, you know, it's the things Mapillary is doing in terms of getting open data from street level imagery
18:01
That's starting to be a realistic alternative to Google Street View Maybe we'll see more of that So In summary, you know free and open source commerce is alive and well and continuing to grow There are multiple business models out there
18:20
to be explored and Used to grow businesses but giving back is is important and people should understand that and do it But you know as in the case with Amazon and Mongo and all those things it starts to get complicated when large amounts of money Are involved investors are involved Venture capitalists are involved etc. So there may be some further challenges ahead that will need to be navigated in this giving back arena
18:49
Thank you So we have Time for about five minutes of questions and then we have our five minute
19:02
Breakover period and then I will pass on to the next speaker It's it's not my Yeah, so the question was do I have any particular advices for for which of the multitude of open-source
19:25
licenses are our best for a given problem and It's not my it's not my area of expertise, so I won't try and give you advice But there are some very important differences in in that arena I don't know if anyone else in the audience might be in a better position
19:43
To answer it but read the licenses read the blogs about the licenses And and make make a why may make a wise informed choice also if you pick a project understand the licenses Because the license says this is what you can do. This is what you can't do
20:01
you know, for example open open street maps license is very restrictive and has been controversial in certain circuit circumstances
20:28
I
20:40
Haven't read anything new coming up, you know, I'm repeating sort of the the dogma These are the three main ones But again, you know the the switch of licenses to acknowledge the power of large cloud vendors Is a potential switch? In business model cockroach labs now sees Amazon as a potential customer
21:02
And they just they don't want to be taken advantage of so it's part of why I put out what's known and I think You're right. There's there's opportunity for new things and a lot of certainly a lot of activity going on Got three more minutes
21:32
The the question the question is Are there is everything going to be open-source in the future? Are there legitimate reasons to keep keep things proprietary?
21:42
I go back to my my house innovation, you know people people in commerce do have to make money Some somewhere or the other and there are certain sort of more core things like operating systems like databases That are very ubiquitous and it makes sense to have a couple of really good ones
22:01
Instead of having everyone reinvent reinvent the wheel or everyone's spending huge amounts of money To buy Oracle or Microsoft or or whatever So I do think it makes sense and it's part of a lot of the existing business models your question again being interesting
22:22
That You do have your own special sauce that you're you're selling whether it's it's a plug-in or an add-on or a connector to mobile or whatever the case may be so I think they're that But it is also a better way of making software if you can attract contributors if your users can help you improve the software
22:44
That's it. That's a huge benefit. You know again what Facebook did with Cassandra or Yahoo's done with Hadoop? time for one more Yes
23:35
Yeah So the the question is, you know, Esri the 800-pound gorilla in the geospatial
23:43
space You know part of me gives Esri credit they pay a lot of attention to their customers and most of their customers are happy and Although some are less happy with it with the cost of things right now So so part of it is to tip tip your hat to them
24:00
The other part of it is to you know, I go back to General Electric Which is a big commercial company. Why are they why are they touting open source? Well, the slide on the left says because the US Department of Defense has said it's a better more secure product for securing You know electric networks So there are you know tout tout some of the benefits and also do what Esri does is continue talking to customers
24:27
And as more and bigger customers adopt open source It becomes a more realistic Alternative I have a friend who works in rural Tennessee with counties, you know, and he's been you know
24:43
one County at a time talking about how expensive ArcGIS desktop is and how good QGIS is and has has made some inroads, but it's It's shoe leather Thank you, and good luck with the elevators and we'll start up with the next talk in a minute