mercredi 10 novembre 2004

Open source businesss models and whole products I'm giving a keynote Nov 19 at the Calibre conference in The Hague. They asked for the presentations in advance, so I sent mine in on Monday. The main reason they asked me to do the keynote is to review the decision to open source Zope (Principia) made 6 years ago. So, around 2/3 of the time will be spent on that. I'm also asked to cover, though, what's happening next for open source business models. On the second part, I'm zeroing in on some ideas I've talked about here and in other speeches. First, open source companies need better money (profitability) more than they need more work. Second, customers need professional open source, but want it as a bazaar and not a cathedral. Neither of these are conventional wisdom. As open source goes mainstream, it faces the same needs as others to transition from product to whole product. Right now, the conventional wisdom is that you take the bazaar of the open source product and make it "safe" with a cathedral for the open source whole product. Or even, change it into a half-open source whole product. Open source products are built by open source developers as a bazaar (conventional wisdom). Perhaps a whole product that is open source is one built by open source businesses as a bazaar. That is, the definition of an open source business model is one that is a bazaar, not a cathedral. Thus I close with the presentation with two questions. Is there demand for an open source whole product? Can a bazaar of open source companies, instead of a cathedral, produce the whole product? 11:55:29 AM   comment []