The series of open source talks continued at CERN. Last week we were privileged to hear Marc Fleury, the founder and ex-President of JBoss speaking about the “Business of OSS”. In the beginning Marc, who is now being retired, wanted to make clear that he is not presenting any company, but only his personal view. Major motivation for him to visit the CERN was to see the preparations of the world’s largest particle accelerator LHC which is due to start later this year.
In his speak Fleury discussed the various open source business models. The five presented models were visited and the ways to generate money from there were discussed as well as related pitfalls of the models. The enthusiastic speaker seemed to have experience from all the five models, each of them being visited at the different phases of the project life-cycle. The ideas that were emphasized probably the most were the possibility to make revenue from offering training in the early phase of the business. Secondly, the double-licensing (GPL-LGPL) seemed to be his favorite model for the more mature projects within professional open source. The pitfalls of using BSD license for professional projects were warned about.
One of the concluding remarks was that the open source is nowadays one of the best models for a small company to become global. It is extremely hard to be funded as proprietary closed source project to the extend that company would have enough resources to go global and establish customer base which generates revenue. Marc also discussed how many businesses tend to go too early to venture capitalist funding, and told that they did never have to touch the money they acquired from the VC. The money was there to make shareholders more secure but it was not needed to cover the operational costs of the company at any time.
And of course, the talk was not all about going through the slides. As Marc pointed out himself, he is an evangelist and will be an evangelist. One rarely sees such an energetic speaker who really likes to speak about his subject of interest. Especially, the free discussion in the end gave us interesting views on the dynamics of the operating system space.
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