Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Sexy as in Open Source
Roberto Galoppini has a blog on commercial open source, that I would strongly recommend to anyone interested in the topic (not just because he is Italian or because he interviewed me some weeks ago). Lately, he has been blogging about open source franchising. Very interesting stuff.His last post is about a presentation he gave at Barcamp, titled "Free as in Business: lucrative coopetition".
He is presenting a few taxonomies to categorize commercial open source projects. We all like taxonomies, since the game is trying to put your own project somewhere (then you should build a quadrant and put yourself in the upper right corner ;-)
I guess Funambol is Hybrid, Symbiotic, Externally Funded. Or maybe not... That's the fun part of taxonomies, you never fit squarely in one category...
There is one sentence in the post, though, that I strongly disagree with. Roberto writes:
Open Source is not sexy yetOpen Source is sexy. The problem might be that we show too much. The code is there, there is nothing we hide. Fully naked. Always. However, I would not go back to proprietary fully clothed software. Code hidden under ten tons of clothes. And you know they will not show you anything, as much as you try to convince them. THAT is not sexy.
Go naked.
Posted by Fabrizio at 08:01
2 Comments:
francesco mapelli said...
Maybe we're nudists of code ;)
Comment Posted at 15:34
Roberto Galoppini said...
Guessing you are mostly right Fabrizio. The classification we made, Giampaolo Garzarelli and I, later has been refined by Dhalander and Magnusson. who specifically addressed the relationship between firms and communities, while our paper was focused on voluntary production. I believe you did a very good job with your community, an interesting example of the symbiotic approach.
But I wouldn't describe Funambol as
Externally Funded, despite you had been a VC-backed startup, since that model describes permanent externally funded projects .
About Open Source sexiness I meant that decisors often don't even know that an open source application might fulfill their needs: many projects lacking the corporate actor are poorly marketed, therefore not in the know.
We need open source firms able to marketing effectively their products, running a sustainable business model, showing how sexy we are.
Keep "going naked" Fabrizio, you're doing very well!
