Software Research and the Industry

Commercial open source has a peculiar sales process. Frequently, when a firm decides to buy (license) a specific type of software like a content management system or a wiki engine, they’ll find that their company already employs multiple solutions, downloaded for free from the Internet. By some measures, this is dangerous to IT governance, as [...]

[Read more →]

Commercial open source firms go to market trying to create an “unfair” competitive advantage that lets them win customers more easily than their competitors. So do most other companies. Commercial open source firms do this by bypassing the traditional purchasing process by getting their software into customer companies for free, before the customers even know [...]

[Read more →]

As a researcher, imprecise naming bothers me. The general confusion around the terms commercial open source, professional open source, and community open source warrants closer analysis.
First my proposal, then some litmus tests, followed by a bit of history.

Commercial open source is software provided as open source where a single legal entity owns the rights [...]

[Read more →]

I’ll be moderating the experts panel on “Global Open Source Trends and Public Initiatives” at the half-day Global Open Source Conference on March 24th, 2008, in San Francisco. Panel participants are Mark Radcliffe of DLA Piper, Sander Ruiter from the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, Tony Wasserman of CMU West, and Arnaud Le Hors of [...]

[Read more →]

[...] There is much less demand for open source services than one might have expected. But it is not only the demand-side. The supply of such services is also problematic. Why? Because it is a hard business to be in. Why that? Because there are no juicy profit margins. Now, that needs some explanation.
Read more [...]

[Read more →]

IDC’s Matt Lawton recently released a new report about open source adoption:
“However, project vendors, project partners, and vendor partners need to step up and provide support and attendant services in order to move the adoption of OSS from early adopters to the mainstream. Only 12% of all projects are supported by a commercial software vendor, [...]

[Read more →]