Open source business models [LWN.net]

Open source business models

Posted Jan 27, 2022 19:16 UTC (Thu) by fmyhr (subscriber, #14803)
Parent article: An attic for LibreOffice Online

Straying a bit from the attic proposal per se, to one of the reasons (afaict) it came about: the need to pay real money to full-time developers to maintain and enhance open-source software. By now, don't we have at least a few successful business models for how this can be accomplished?

It seems to me that a model where the source and periodic builds are available for free download for self-supported self-hosted software works reasonably well for projects like Proxmox and Ubuntu. Customers who need official support, customizations, SLAs and/or hosted solutions purchase those from companies who pay the developers.

Collabora, it seems to me, offers very reasonable per-set pricing:
https://www.collaboraoffice.com/subscriptions/

Why they don't offer a hosted service, which would seems a natural for this application, is a mystery. Maybe I missed it?

It seems a shame that TDF and Collabora apparently have trouble avoiding stepping on each others' toes. As an outsider, it is confusing. Why even bother with a LOOL binary when free Collabora Online Development Edition is available?

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Open source business models

Posted Jan 28, 2022 10:39 UTC (Fri) by tlamp (subscriber, #108540) [Link]

> It seems to me that a model where the source and periodic builds are available for free download for self-supported self-hosted software works reasonably well for projects like Proxmox and Ubuntu.
> Customers who need official support, customizations, SLAs and/or hosted solutions purchase those from companies who pay the developers.

Yeah, this is the way. A big chunk of production setups will *always* want to have enterprise support ready for a central piece of their infrastructure, those who don't will soon learn that they then either need to spent more from their own maintenance person/cost pool or fail on providing an adequate service. Will quite some people take the free ride? Sure, but a lot of them still will contribute to a healthy community, and can be leveraged for providing a better enterprise experience, iow., that's a feature, not a bug.

If just providing ready-to-use binary builds threatens to fail your business case, your business case isn't worth much and will fail anyway...

Open source business models

Posted Jan 28, 2022 16:11 UTC (Fri) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]

They seem to have an ecosystem of partnerships with (often local/regional) companies, some of which offer hosted services (often with integration into other systems like groupware, cloud storage, etc.). I can imagine some SMBs, associations, etc. prefer working with local service providers, for legal & trust reasons, so this makes sense, but it might complicate things if they don’t want to compete directly with those.
Maybe they could make those options more obvious though?

OTOH a worldwide Collabora online service competing with the likes of Google or Microsoft on price & reliability could be hard…