Re: Will we see a billion dollar open source business?
Steve O’Grady asks: Will we see a billion dollar open source business?
My response. We have seen one, and it is GOOG. Sure, they don’t sell software. Instead they monetize it with advertising. Is everything they do open source? No. Are a lot of things they do open with the ability to extend? Yes. Close enough for me.
The main point is the next billion dollar open source company probably will not make their money through licenses or support. It may well be ads or something totally different.
I like the thought, but Google’s got just as much proprietary code as Microsoft or IBM. The are just very good at marketing themselves as “green”. It’s the new Whole Foods and Southwest Airlines approach, and it works well.
I agree Google has a lot of proprietary code. I think the broader question is how do you define an open source business. Is it only a business that sells support for a software package that has open source code? Is something like spiceworks written in rails where all the source ships with product open source?
I do like the idea of removing the constraints around selling license and/or support as the only way to be an open source business. True growth lies in a different business model.
to be an “open source company” I think you need to make contributions. google is not exactly notable for its oss contributions so far.
I have to agree with James on this one. I’m not sure I can even recall one open source project led by Google. Now they have plenty of open APIs for many of their web services to enable developers to make use of, but most of those are even limited to a restricted use. With the whole intent to drive eyes to their site, which is absolutely brilliant!
Breaking the Billion Dollar Barrier…
In what is a surprisingly rare event, I’m seeing some of the commentary I expected to see around an entry here. As Tim Bray says, this is uncommon because “what I think about what I write has no relation to……
[...] After commenting on Brandon’s post about Google’s supposed open source strategy, I started think about which companies promote a “life is great� marketing strategy. By “life is great�, I mean these companies seem to have the following in common: (1) hire and motivate employees who genuinely appear to have high morale and be enjoying their jobs, (2) promote a “customer comes first� attitude, (3) tend to favor environmentally sound approaches to doing business (or at least market that they do), and (4) focus on a sweet spot combination of higher than average quality at reasonable prices. A lot of companies will claim to do numbers 2 through 4; however, CEOs across the nation should be paying attention to the number 1 aspect because that is the key differentiator to obtaining sustained margins. Here are three examples, and all are places where doing business is typically a very enjoyable experience. [...]
[...] James Governor left a comment on a previous post where he said to be an open source company “you need to make contributions.” I like this definition as it is simple and does not prescribe a specific business model. That is, you need not sell software to be considered open source but you do need to give back. [...]