Open source vs. commercial software
I just read an interesting thread over at Panic from Fuzzy’s blog. Here is the thread…
My favorite commenter Cameron Purdy of Tangosol/Oracle engaged in a friendly exchange with Fuzzy about the economics of releasing software as open source rather than keeping it closed and charging for licenses. I am a big open source advocate and I proudly wear my OpenBSD shirt in public. However I have never worked for an open source software company. I don’t think that many people do actually.
Appistry is not an open source company, although we love open source software and are very careful not to lock in our customers. I was very impressed with our CEO, Kevin Haar, when he advocated for adding even more features to our product to make it easy for customers to remain decoupled from any of our proprietary APIs. However, we still charge money for our product and we don’t publish the source code. But does charging money make us evil? I don’t think so or I wouldn’t work here. Fuzzy is clearly a strong open source advocate, but if you follow his argument to the extreme does that mean software should always be free? Cameron points out that the amount of revenue made at a service company is much lower than a product company. So are we here in the good old USA now supposed to give everything away because Apache and JBoss do?
I don’t know the answer, I only know that I like writing software for a living, and as long as companies like BEA and IBM are charging for their software and making millions then why can’t everybody else try? One of Fuzzy’s points was standards, I totally get that. Being a software architect, I have been careful to leverage standards whenever possible. But if a product doesn’t lock you in architecturally and has years of intellectual property built up to help solve a problem, why can’t you charge for it?
I don’t think the whole software community wants to work as consultants during the day just so they can code open source apps at night. There will always be a product market as long as the product 1) works and 2) makes sense economically. I know full well that as our technology becomes more broad there will be a call to build an open source platform that is similar. That’s fine, even JBoss doesn’ t have 100% market share. And it never will, service companies cannot scale to the necessary size so a vacuum will always exist for product companies that can afford to support customers because of their license revenue. So the waxing and waning of products and OSS will come and go. But there will always be free software and there will always be commercial software. That’s just the rules of the game now.
Or not. If I was any good at making predictions about software I would have bought Microsoft stock back in the early nineties. What can I say, I thought Windows 3.11 sucked.
-j
May 19th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
Jasen,
You ignored the most important thing I said. I do not just want FOSS. I do want commercial support along with my FOSS.
As I state here:
http://fuzzypanic.blogspot.com/2007/05/oss-middleware-license-sort.html
I guess you won’t show up in my sort then.
Unless of course your product meets this criteria: “… if it brings tremendous value to the table and simply can’t be done without a more flexible & innovation friendly licensing alternative.”
I doubt it from looking at your website, however, I couldn’t tell what your product does - there doesn’t appear to be any documentation on the website - just marketing stuff. It did sound like you are a multi-language type of GridGain - I’m sure plus a lot more. Anyways, feel free to educate me. I’m not a zealot. I’m just stating my preferences.
Cheers,
Mike
May 19th, 2007 at 6:35 pm
I didn’t think I ignored your point at all. I was agreeing with Cameron’s counter point that writing software is expensive and service revenue doesn’t scale. I read the post you mentioned and you mention the expense of writing software in the Electronic Design Automation industry. Well it pretty much costs the same to write in every industry. Developers cost money. The natural extension of saying that all middle ware should be FOSS is that nobody gets paid to write it, they only get paid to support it. The only reason that the support model works for you is because the rest of the market isn’t using the FOSS model. If they were, you’d never get support. That model doesn’t scale. It’s a legitimate model, I’m not saying FOSS is bad, I’m saying exclusive FOSS in the middle ware market would be impossible to sustain.
As a thought expiriment, do you think JBoss would exist if BEA and IBM hadn’t made the J2EE market legitimate first?
As far as value, we replace solutions that cost an order of magnitude more. I’d say that is tremendous value. There are many differentiating features of our “compute grid” product. One is reliable transactions, I mentioned tihs on your blog, you can pull the plug and the client will be isolated from that failure. We make commiditry hardware reliable, not just load balanced. Many J2EE app server users try to compare what we are doing to the classic cluster, and what the other grid vendors are doing. I usually point out that if you are sending hundreds of requests into the grid or cluster and you kill a machine you will lose those transactions. To us middle ware should handle the reliability for you, our software will ensure that those transactions complete without the client being aware of the failure. I don’t think GridGain does that. I know Spring Batch doesn’t.
As for the web site, maybe you could help us fix it. We have had many talks internally about how to even explain this software to people. You are clearly a superuser in this area and are very educated. How do you describe something like this to a CIO? We have customers that use J2EE, .NET, mainframes, multi-processor unix boxes, everything. So we don’t position our message at one area of the market.
What would you like to see to explain it? (btw I’d say GridGain is a less reliable single platform version of us.)
-jasen
May 20th, 2007 at 10:21 am
Jasen,
I’m just going to drop the whole oss argument. We clearly just disagree. If you are having success with your business model, more power to you. I think that you should take a look around though - the number of oss vendors continues to grow. The number of companies having success using commercial oss continues to grow. It isn’t just Linux and JBoss (ie just RedHat).
When you say “services” I don’t hear “subscriptions”, but maybe you are saying that. Also, many infrastructure oss companies have dual-licensing for OEM etc. Grid software would seem to be ideal for this.
The last thing *I* would want to be doing today is starting a commercial proprietary software company focusing on middleware. I think that is a pretty tough slog. But like I said, if it is working for you, more power to you.
As to your question on your website:
You said: “What would you like to see to explain it?”
Just put the technical docs on the website - I think you have the CIO set covered. But if you do get their attention, the first thing they are going to do is get their architects/senior dev people to look at it. As it stands you are not going to sell to architects/senior dev people first and have them pull it through and bring it to their CIO. As it stands, when I look at your website I groan. I read “proprietary software that is going to lock me in and make me miserable”. I then read, “if it does work who is going to buy them - will they invest in it? kill it?”. You don’t want the techies having this as a first impression - at least I wouldn’t. But perhaps other tech people haven’t been tortured like I have and perhaps are more open to this.
I think that companies like Tangosol and GigaSpaces address this very well. Check out their websites. They have all their tech docs online in a wiki.
Mike
May 20th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
Jasen, Mike,
OS arguments are tough, are they not? I’ve start GridGain as a OS company after working for another close source grid business. I would agree to a degree with Jason and Cameron that professional OS model works only for a narrow segment of software. It worked for JBoss, it works for Spring and hopefully it will work for GridGain.
Let me explain it this way: we shift our revenue from license to support/consulting/training with the rational behind that if a company would have purchased a license it *will* purchase the support, and if a company would not purchase a license it *will not* purchase the support either – so we are not loosing much at all. This equation depends on the type of software we are talking about – and I believe grid computing fits into it.
Another important point that I’ve witnessed first hand multiple times: when a company buys a license for the middleware software it has *absolutely zero value* to this business… In fact, you buy middleware in order to build later yet another software – the actual business application that does have certain value to the business. More and more companies are starting to realize this rather obvious ROI delay and shifting they expenditure towards IT activity that actually produces the value – and that’s where OS model shines.
As far as robustness, GridGain surely support fairly sophisticated pluggable fault tolerance, collision resolution, and preemption with state checkpoints. Those are basics and we cover them for sure. Being the young product we obviously won’t compete every feature to feature with established players (in the immediate future) and I can readily point out some of the areas where we are still lacking: GUI-based management being one, for example. But we are working hard and we’ll be catching up quickly
Great discussions,
Nikita.