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Open source software business model concerns in the age of the public cloud

A few years ago at Gluecon I was sitting at the lunch table with some new acquaintances. The talk turned to business models and someone mentioned the chilling effect of the public cloud providers on open source businesses. Companies whose main product was open source software (OSS) originally had a straightforward business model: sell support and consulting. (I’m leaving aside sponsorships, donations, dual licensing and other smaller streams of income. I’m focusing on what I’ve seen work to build larger, stable companies. If you are solopreneur you have a different set of options.)

This shifted over time to withholding certain features (the “open core” model) and licensing them to customers who wanted them. Open core was better for companies because it is more scalable and profitable to sell software than it is to sell labor (which is what support and consulting essentially are). Customers won because a certain set of them needed features that were likely not core to the software, such as single sign on or auditing, but were critical for their use cases. These customers tended to be businesses with money to spend. Open core, however, has some problems.

The fundamental one is “what should be OSS and what should be licensed” becomes a pressing question. Building a product is tough enough in general, but now there’s an additional marketing, product and engineering complexity.

The SaaS Business Model Cometh

With the rise of SaaS a third monetization option appeared: offer their software as a service and run it on behalf of their customers. NodeBB, ElasticSearch  and others all do this. The customer wins because they have a lower TCO and benefit from continual updates and the company wins because SaaS combines the margins of open core with recurring revenue. This has even caused some companies to move away from open core. The community remains satisfied because if they want, they can self-host.

Enter the cloud companies. Cloud companies could and did take open source projects, packaged them up and offered them as a service for a low monthly fee.

As a customer, and I’ve been such a customer many times, using an offering from these providers has definite benefits:

  • The cloud operators know how to run software at scale.
  • They are already part of the accounting infrastructure. There’s no additional procurement process.
  • They don’t typically deprecate software (killedbygoogle notwithstanding), so as a customer you are less worried ongoing support and availability.

Adoption by a cloud provider has benefits for the open source project, too.

  • It’s proof the software has reached a large level of customer demand, otherwise the big clouds wouldn’t bother.
  • Improvements to the software or documentation may be donated back.
  • It increases the number of folks who use the software or know about it.

However, those benefits may not balance out the loss or threat of loss of revenue from SaaS hosting. This was the chilling effect mentioned around that lunch table. When I read or ask folks about this issue, I’ve heard three separate proposed solutions:

  • Be better
  • You should be so lucky
  • Close your source or re-license

Be Better

First, as the prime mover behind the product, a company should be able to be better than the cloud operators. Not necessarily better at running all software, but better at running theirs. After all, they built it. This does assume that the best people to operate a service are the ones who built it. This may or may not be true. I think it is definitely true at a small scale–they are going to know which knobs to tweak, and if they run into an issue they can immediately fix it in the code base. As software gets more and more popular, the ability to run it well diffuses, however.

The company behind any project also should certainly have a better sense of customer needs and the ability to map those to its internal roadmap. Of course, being an open source project means that the advantages are fleeting. If anything is turned into code and released, it made available to competitors.

An even bigger issue is that this relies on customers being willing to stick with the company on the bleeding edge. For rapidly growing or changing software that may make sense. Where major functionality is being built regularly, upgrades are an easy sell. But OSS isn’t adopted by the cloud provider until it has a large audience, which means they are likely very functional for a lot of use cases. This means that the company won’t get as many folks on the upgrade train, which makes the “be better” argument more problematic. If the cloud provider can offer a “good enough” experience, then their other advantages start to dominate.

You Should Be So Lucky

This is the argument that the chances of an application becoming popular enough to be adopted by a public cloud are so low that it’s not worth spending time thinking about. I asked Steve O’Grady about the OSS business model predicament at a webinar once and this was his answer.

There’s a lot of merit to this. The biggest obstacle to an open source company succeeding is not anyone taking the software and running it, it’s the software not being useful or known. Obscurity has killed many a company, far more than AWS adopting their software.

But when a company reaches a certain size, this advice is less of a solution and more naming a strategic threat. Yes, they are lucky to have their solution be popular. But what can they actually do about the threat to what may be a sizable portion of their revenue? This argument doesn’t help with that.

Close Your Source

Depending on how the company developed the software, they could relicense or close source. This may require some prep work. First, make sure the software is all owned by the company; have all contributors assign over their copyrights. This will make it more difficult for you to reap some of the benefits of open source: easy contributions from others.

The company can also choose to relicense only certain portions of the codebase, taking a step towards open core. In any case, prepare to consult an IP lawyer.

The company must also be ready for the blowback from the community. Which hurts more, losing something that was once free or paying for something from the get-go? For me, it’s the former. Many of the marketing, engineering and product benefits gained from being open source will be lost; this is the price to pay for obviating the cloud vendor SaaS threat.

The firm could also dual license the software or use something like the Business Source License, which strikes a different balance, but still has some attributes of an open source license.

Alternatives

None of these sound very fun. I think the answer is to back up and consider whether to make a project open source initially. Consider this very carefully initially to avoid pain.

The benefits of open source for a business’ core offering are:

  • Lower friction of adoption
  • Contributions from outside an organization (these must be fostered, they may be free in terms of money but not time)
  • Increased rigorousness for the eng team (coding in public can make code better)
  • Easier to recruit because devs like working on open source
  • More eyes on the code means shallower bugs
  • Marketing halo

Are these worth the risk? I can’t answer that authoratively. If they are, another option might be to prepare for SaaS revenue cannibalization; this may mean going open core, focusing on consulting or support, or possibly never even building a SaaS solution.

There’s more than one way to be open. A company can do open development, inviting customers in to the product process. Would being more open with the development process (using public GitHub issues, for example, instead of an internal issue tracker) allow a company to get some level of contribution from outside the org? This would also imposes that “spotlight level rigor” on the eng team. Could the company make the software “free as in beer”, rather than “free as in speech” to lower adoption costs?

A firm can also release software as open source without taking any feedback from the community (“throw it over the wall”), which may be a good choice if the software isn’t core. Big companies do this every day. Facebook gladly open sources their computer plans and React, but certainly wouldn’t open source the core Facebook application.

In conclusion, if you are planning to build a company on an open source project, think about the main revenue flows for that company and what you’ll do in the unlikely, but hopeful, event the project succeeds.