OpenSource

I’ve long been an advocate of open source (the business model and the software), as well as openly accessible educational content and the right to freely share ideas. On the eve of the fifth anniversary of Jarche Consulting, I feel that it’s time once again to put my money (or lack thereof) where my mouth is.

All content on this site is now licensed as Creative Commons Attribution.

I have lifted the “non-commercial” restriction. Do what you want with my work; you do not need any further permission, just give me credit.

I’ve listened to arguments that an attribution-only license is easy for academics or those who have regular jobs, but not for those who make their living with their words and ideas. I want to show that it is also possible for the self-employed to use this kind of open license for their professional work.

This is not purely altruistic. In the long run I hope that this makes it easier for people to use my work and in return someone may notice what I do and decide to engage my services.

I’m preparing a workshop for later this month and one of the topics will be the rise of open source and the business models around it. Here are some interesting sites and comments that I’ve come across lately:

Matt Asay: “The benefits of SaaS [software as a service] also point to its greatest flaw: it’s the ultimate lock-in scenario when it comes to your data, even though it “liberates” the user from software. In fact, it’s this very liberation that creates the problem. If you don’t have the software, you really don’t have the data, no matter the vendor’s data policy. My data qua data is only as useful as the software used to open it up and read it.”

The Economic Times: “Clearly, the IPR-based [intellectual property rights] model for innovation is just not working. Strong IP protection is encouraging protectionism and is harming the way science is done. Many more patents are taken out to stop others from working than to protect one’s own research. It is premised on very high costs of development, that are sought to be recovered through high monopoly pricing of products.”

Dave Snowden: “… I think the position deeply confuses the concept of open source with that of not having to pay for things. It also fails to understand that all business models make money somewhere, the issue is where and (to my mind the most important thing) the degree of transparency of said business model. ”

Guillaume Lebleu: “The idea is to not view open source as an all or nothing strategy, but rather as a marketing technique to segment your market and maximize revenue, except that in the open source case, the revenue is mostly intangible.” [follow link for charts]

I’ll be summarizing my workshop and posting here by the end of the month.

RWW features a story about DimDim, which is an open source web-conferencing platform. I’ve used it and it compares well with the various proprietary systems around. RWW talks about DimDim’s three business propositions:

1. Big company – cut your Webex/GoToMeeting bills by 50% or more
2. Established online venture that needs online meetings to close sales with end users – no hassle revenue share
3. Start-up with enough techies, but no cash – use the open source base with normal GPL rules (and thus grow the platform for DimDim and everybody else)

I’ve discussed open source business models a lot on this site, and dug up these 3 basic OS business models from Matt Asay (2004):

1. Product Proprietary or Commodity Model
2. Commodity (Brand & Servicing) Model, e.g. Red Hat: make money from your services
3. Transitional (Pragmatic) Model. The transitional model is focused on solving problems (e.g. MySQL and JBoss) and is open source in the sense that code is open, but may be closed in terms of controlling the development process and the developers.

DimDim’s model would be #2, making money from services, including software as a service, but still remaining open to engage a wider user/developer community to fuel growth. When times are tough (can you say recession?) then cutting costs takes on a higher priority and it will be interesting to see if there is a forthcoming spike in OS adoption.

I’m preparing a talk that I will be giving next month to NRC-IRAP industry technology advisors and one of the themes will be open source business models. I’ll be updating my research and would appreciate any other unique or interesting business models around the use of open source software or OS content. Wikipedia would be an example of the latter, but I’m looking for lesser-known examples. Of course I’ll summarize and publish my findings here.

The fool says that you can use Wikimedia Commons to find all kinds of pictures or other media that are in the public domain or have fewer copyright restrictions.

I subscribe to the picture of the day which is a great source of visual inspiration. Another source of pictures is the Creative Commons Search engine, where you can find a poisson d’avril by Aldor:

David Bahn at Metropolitan State University of Minnesota asked me last week if I had any information about implementation and maintenance costs of open source versus proprietary learning systems. I referred him to Edutools and Brandon-Hall for comparative information as well as an older study done in French for the Québec government.

David then send me these other information sites that he had come across in his research:

Blaisdell, M. (2004). Course Management Systems >> It’s the Support, Stupid! Campus Technology, 12/28/2004. Retrieved from http://www.campustechnology.com/articles/38766/ on 3/23/2008.

Cheal, C., Cummings, R., Fernandez, K., & Penney, M. (2006). Choices and Changes: How Four Public Universities Are Coping with the LMS Market Consolidation. Presentation (and podcast) from panel discussion at the EDUCAUSE 2006 conference.  Retrieved from on3/23/2008.

Cheal, C.  (2006). LMS Comparison from ELIS at Oakland University. Retreived from http://www2.oakland.edu/elis/policies.cfm on 3/23/3008.

Heid, S. (2006).  “Course Management Systems: A Tipping Point. Campus Technology, 12/28/2006.  Retrieved from http://www.campustechnology.com/articles/41719/ on 3/23/2008.

Marshall, M. & Mitchell, G. (2007). Benchmarking International E-learning Capability with the E-Learning Maturity Model. In Proceedings of EDUCAUSE in Australasia 2007, April 29 –  May 2, 2007, Melbourne, Australia.

I noticed this piece on The App Gap which mentioned “knowledge artisans”, and it reminded me of a business plan I did about three years ago:

Next-gen knowledge artisans are amplified versions of their pre-industrial counterparts. Equipped with and augmented by technology, they rely on their human capital and skill to solve complex problems and develop new ideas, products and services. Highly productive, knowledge artisans are capable individually and in small groups of producing goods and services that used to take substantially larger teams and resources. In addition to redefining how work is done, knowledge artisans are creating new organizational structures and business models.

Here’s what I had written as part of the business model:

Open Source Artisans*
We are a small company with several years of development experience who have embraced open source as a way to reduce customer costs, ensure long-term stability of our software and focus on what we do best — custom development. As part of a larger global development community, we can stay small and nimble and quickly react to market and technology changes. We openly partner with other like-minded companies and share in the risks of software development, implementation, maintenance and service. We are true to our partners and our customers because we offer Old World service for the long term, by staying on-time and on-budget for the short-term.

* An artisan (craftsperson) is a skilled manual worker in a particular craft, using specialized tools and machinery. Artisans were the dominant producers of goods before the Industrial Revolution. ABC Co. are the Artisans of the post-Industrial era, retrieving old world care and attention to detail, but using the latest tools and processes. To ensure that we stay current, we are members of various Open Source Guilds, such as the Drupal development community.

The business plan was written in 2005 and I’ve stripped out all of the location-specific details and attached it as a PDF if anyone is interested. For reasons not linked to this plan, the company decided not to continue this effort, so it wasn’t implemented. If you find that it’s of some use, please post a comment.

ABC Business Plan

I was recently interviewed by Canadian Technology News and the resulting article, Six Strategies for Content Management, covers several points worth considering. Proprietary software and open source options for enterprise content management (ECM) are both discussed. I’m glad that I’m quoted on what I consider the two most important points:

• Open source may do the job
• Tap into free (or near-free) Web 2.0 ECM tools