Open Source Software

open-source as a business model

• Open Source: From Community to Commercialization
  by Peter Levine and Jennifer Li

• From Netflix Streaming To Contact Tracing, The Open-Source Revolution Is Disrupting These 6 Industries

Open source licensing has always been a hotbed of debate. Oracle, for example, is still suing Google for copyright infringement over the use of Java APIs. And the complexity of open source licensing is about to get even worse.

The incentives for these companies to change their licenses are obvious. Providers like AWS are making huge profits taking free code and running it as a service, and companies like Redis Labs would prefer to be the ones profiting.

MongoDB, for example, was dropped by open source giant Red Hat, with Red Hat's Tom Callaway saying “it seems clear that the intent of the license author is to cause fear, uncertainty, and doubt towards commercial users of software under that license.” Redis Labs, shortly after adopting the Commons Clause, had its code forked by Fedora and Debian engineers into a new, fully open source project called GoodFORM.

It will be interesting to see if they're able to walk this tightrope, retaining the communities that power their success, while maximizing profits.

Konstantin Vinogradov 2020 Open Source Growth Benchmarks and the 20 Fastest-Growing OSS Startups

There are plenty of battle-tested metrics for SaaS (for instance: Scale VP, Serena, OpenView), but nothing actionable for open-source software (OSS) yet. This article is addressing this issue.

More Open Source Benchmarks, the ROSS Index and the Fastest-Growing OSS Startups in Q3 2020