open core

Newspapers go 'Open Core' to survive

Open source hasn't traditionally been thought of as an innovative force, but based on suggestions that the media industry is borrowing its leading business model, perhaps open source is at least the sexiest nun in the convent.

Whether you're selling software or newspapers, it's tough to get paid in the digital age. This is due, in part, to shifting value.

As Arnon Mishkin, a media consultant with Mitchell Madison Group, suggests, "The vast majority of the value [in news media] gets captured by aggregators linking and scraping rather than by the news organizations that get linked … Read more

Trent Reznor: 'So you want to make money on the Web'

For those who have yet to grok the Open Core business model, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame will sing it to you. In a series of forum entries, Reznor explains exactly how to build a music business on the Web and, in the process, classically defines Open Core, the primary business model for open-source software, too.

Reznor writes:

Forget thinking you are going to make any real money from record sales. Make your record cheaply (but great) and GIVE IT AWAY. As an artist you want as many people as possible to hear your work. Word of mouth … Read more

Open-source licensing: Your mileage may vary

Over the past 10 years that I've been involved in open source, one thing has become strikingly clear to me: there are no real predictors of open-source success. There are, of course, general principles that contribute to the creation of successful open-source projects, but serendipitous "right project, right time" circumstances often matter most.

I was therefore intrigued to read two articles that crystallized my own thinking around critical components of successful open-source projects.

The first is from BusinessWeek and details the mechanics of Mozilla's Firefox community. Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox, reveals that while … Read more

The cathedral plus the bazaar: Open source and Apple (design) envy

Walk the halls of any open-source conference and you'll see a large percentage of attendees with ironically un-open-source Apple laptops and iPhones. I've commented on the reasons for this before, but a new thought sprung to mind while reading Matthew Thomas' excellent (and old) "Why free software usability tends to suck."

Open-source advocates like good design as much as anyone, but the open-source development process is often not the best way to achieve it.

Thomas now works for Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, which arguably offers the industry's best Linux experience for personal computers. I … Read more

Twitter, Red Hat, news: We're all in this Internet thing together

As the Internet dismantles one business after another, it's surprising how fungible the responses to the Web have become.

Reading a recent Economist description of the changing newspaper business, for example, I was surprised by how much its transformation mirrors the software business. The Economist suggests a change to the economics of news businesses:

(T)he plight of the news business does not presage the end of news. As large branches of the industry wither, new shoots are rising. The result is a business that is smaller and less profitable, but also more efficient and innovative.

This is almost … Read more

SugarCRM CEO Roberts replaced by board member

John Roberts on Wednesday resigned from his post as CEO of open-source CRM vendor SugarCRM, leaving board member Larry Augustin to assume the role of interim CEO while the company conducts a formal search for his replacement.

Roberts, whose grounds for leaving the company and future plans remain undisclosed, has made a huge impact on the open-source world, innovating the "Open Core" business model and helping drive open-source applications into the enterprise.

SugarCRM, despite losing Roberts, will be in good hands with Larry Augustin, who, as founder and former CEO of VA Linux, sits on a number of … Read more

Protecting community from corporate

Sometimes our best intentions give way to our worst, for a wide variety of reasons. This is as true of corporate amalgamations of individuals as it is of those individuals on their own, and it's as true for open-source companies as it is for proprietary companies.

Community is the tonic that keeps corporate aspirations in line, just as community helps to keep individuals walking the straight and narrow of societal norms. As The Economist recently highlighted, new research suggests that "having a crowd around often makes things better."

In other words, while we normally point to crowds … Read more

Open Sources Episode 6: Open source in the enterprise

Don't think that Matt Asay and I forgot about our Open Sources podcast series...quite the contrary! We're making an effort to get into a bi-weekly schedule and we're also trying to make the switch to CNet proper rather my rinky-dink server setup.

We're joined on February 26, 2009 for Episode 6 by Neil Erickson, Senior IT Director at a Fortune 500 company. Neil brings some much needed reality to our discussion, reminding us that enterprises are trying to solve problems, not obsess about open versus closed. Neil also calls us the Gwar of open source, … Read more

It's OK to be an open-source flip-flopper

Reading through the latest copy of BusinessWeek last night, I particularly enjoyed this comment from Jack and Suzy Welch on political "flip-flopping," otherwise known as "changing one's mind in the face of new information":

It's hard to know exactly when flip-flopping first became a dirty word in the leadership lexicon. But in recent years, it has been the epithet of choice against political candidates on both sides of the fence...In those cases, critics made it sound as if revising a stance is some kind of a moral failing.

What nonsense. It is the … Read more