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The reason we are confident that the comparative decline in the use of the GNU GPL family of licenses and the increasing significance of complementary vendors in relation to funding for open source software-related vendors will continue is due to the analysis of our database of more than 400 open source software-related vendors, past and present.

We previously used the database to analyze the engagement of vendors with open source projects for our Control and Community report, plotting the strategies used by the vendors against the year in which they first began to engage with open source projects to get an approximate view of open source-related strategy changes over time.

For example, we found that the engagement of vendors with projects that used strong copyleft licenses peaked in 2006, while the engagement of vendors with projects using non-copyleft licenses had been rising steadily since 2002.

Analysis of our updated database shows that the the number of new vendors engaging with open source projects in each year has risen steadily in recent years, from 26 in 2008 to 44 in 2011. However, as noted last week, we have also seen a shift towards ‘complementary vendors’ – those that are dependent on open source software to build their products and services, even though those products and services may not themselves be open source.

2010 was the first year in which we saw more complementary vendors engage with open source projects than open source specialist, and that trend accelerated in 2011.

As previously explained, complementary vendors were responsible for over 30% of open source software-related funding raised in 2011, and we should expect that proportion to remain high given that over 57% of the vendors engaging with open source in 2011 were complementary vendors.

We have also seen that complementary vendors are more likely to engage with projects with non-copyleft licenses (38% of complementary vendors have engaged with projects with non-copyleft licenses, compared to 24% that have engaged with projects with strong copyleft licenses).

If we look at all 400+ vendors in our database in terms of open source software license preference, the trend towards new vendors engaging with non-copyleft licenses is clear.

There has been a strong shift from vendors towards non-copyleft licenses in recent years, accelerated in 2011 by the likes of Apache Hadoop and OpenStack in particular. This does not mean that the number of projects using strong copyleft licensing has decreased (although as we previously saw the proportion of projects using the GPL family of licenses has declined).

It is indicative, we believe, of the shift away from specialist open source vendors using vendor-led projects and strong copyleft licenses towards multi-vendor collaborative projects and proprietary implementations of open source code, however.

This trend should not really surprise anyone. For some time we have seen open source becoming part of the fabric of modern software development and licensing strategies, rather than a competitive differentiator. Back in 2009 we predicted the increased importance of business strategies that relied on vendor-led development communities, rather than projects dominated by a single vendor.

We called this “open source 4.0″ and later suggested that it might be considered the golden age of open source, based on our belief that vendors had learned that they stand to gain more from collaborating on open source projects and differentiating at another stage in the software stack than they do from attempting to control open source projects.

Updating the results of our analysis to the end of 2011 and 400+ vendors indicates that, from the perspective of the commercial adoption of open source business strategies at least, we were not far off.

Some might not consider the proliferation of multi-vendor open source communities and proprietary distributions of open source software as the peak of achievement for open source. Each is of course entitled to come to their own conclusions about the implications.

Our perspective, as always, is that open source methodologies present a potentially disruptive, and also valuable, asset that complements the way both vendors and enterprise IT organizations conduct their businesses.

Our analysis indicates, however, that open source methodologies are increasingly being employed by ‘complementary vendors’ with a leaning towards more permissive licensing.

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We’ve written about how a bad economy is indeed good for open source software. We’ve also recognized that with open source software’s maturity and place at the enterprise software table, a bad economy can be a double-edged sword for open source since the failure or fade of large enterprise customers, say big banks, hurts open source vendors right alongside traditional software providers.

What is interesting is that after a couple of years of economic rebuilding, we’ve seen recently how open source is being driven by innovation, particularly in cloud computing, where open source is prevalent and disruptive, and also mobile computing, which continues to be impacted by openness.

Given recent economic developments around the globe, I’m wondering whether we may see a return of cost as the main driver and benefit of open source software in the enterprise. Recent conversations with vendors and customers illustrates the fact that the motivation for adopting open source is not always the main benefit from open source. For example, open source users and customers identified cost as the main reason for adopting open source when we asked more than 1,700 of them two years ago. However, when the same group was asked what was the main benefit from open source, the top pick was flexibility. We also saw dramatic increases in factors such as performance and reliability when comparing drivers for adoption and benefits from adoption. Still, just as we’ve seen unpaid community Linux lead to paid subscription Linux and also paid Linux lead to more unpaid community Linux use, it can go both ways with open source advantages, as well. One recent conversation with an up-and-coming, open source-centered vendor in the NoSQL space highlighted how many large enterprise customers are deploying open source in divisional, departmental, pilot and other limited form to replace traditional databases primarily for flexibility, performance and similar reasons, but finding the cost savings to be significant and worthy of wider deployment.

This begs the question whether open source software, driven by its myriad of advantages for different contexts, finds a way to win regardless of whether economic conditions are good or bad? There’s no question open source has displayed staying power throughout both. We should also point out that these advantages and factors end up putting a lot of pressure on open source software development and projects, given there are inherent expectations of cost-savings, flexibility, speed, performance, scalability, etc. As we’ve highlighted recently, open source is not always the correct route for enterprise ogranizations. However, we do believe that if done properly, open source projects and communities can and do deliver benefits that enable both providers and consumers of technology.

Similar to sales and marketing, longevity, economic and developer opportunity, open core, etc., it all boils down to the community, which in a good economy tends to drive innovation and value or in a bad economy serves as a source of cost efficiency, savings and survival. That is, of course, if the community is properly supported in code, cash, contributions and stewardship that still allows open source to do its thing.

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Last week I presented “From support services to software services – the evolution of open source business strategies” at the OSBC event in San Francisco.

The presentation was effectively a work in progress update on our research into the various strategies employed by technology vendors to generate revenue from open source software.

It included a partial explanation of my theory that those strategies do not exist in isolation, but are steps on an evolutionary process, and also introduced our model for visualizing the core elements of an open source-related business strategy.

I provided a number of examples of how the model could be used to compare the strategies of various open source businesses. Here, for example, is the visualization of MySQL’s strategy.

I was pleased with the response to the presentation, not least the number of people who asked us to send them the slide so they could fill it in for their company and send it back to us.

This is definitely something we would like to do in the future but before we do I would like to ensure we have dealt with any problems related to the model. For now I would be more interested in hearing from companies that feel their strategy is NOT covered by the model.

As Jack Repenning has pointed out, the model does not offer the granularity to express some of the nuances of the various “open complement “ strategies where open source code is not monetized directly but via complementary products (and in my own presentation I had to go beyond the model to discuss “open inside” – building proprietary products on open foundations, and “open edge” – using open source to drive innovation on top of a closed platform).

My initial feeling is that there will always be a level of detail that cannot be expressed in a simplified model such as this, although if I can build them in I will.

The development model category also needs some tinkering, not least to cover “gated community” approaches.

Additionally, of course, the model is not great when it comes to multi-product companies (although multiple models can be used to explain a larger strategy).

So anyway, if you think your company does not fit our model, do please tell us how. To help you understand how the model works, here’s a quick user guide and glossary of terms.

Revenue triggers:
These are the things that paying customers actually pay money for (apart from advertising which is an indirect relationship). They should be pretty self-explanatory. When we refer to “support services” we mean support, training, consulting, implementation services etc. “Software services” refers to SaaS and cloud delivery. Vendors can have multiple revenue triggers for a single product.

Software license:
For the purposes of this exercise we are interested in whether the company has a preference for permissive or reciprocal licensing for the underlying open source project, or uses both.

End user licensing:
What licensing strategy is applied to the product that customers pay for (as opposed to the project that it is based on)? It could be the same open source license (single open source) or a combination of open source licenses (assembled open source). It could be that the same code is available using open source and commercial licenses (dual licensing) or that commercial extensions are available (open core). Alternatively, a vendor may not monetize the open source project itself, but offer complementary software or hardware products (open complement), or may turn the open source code into a fully proprietary product (closed). Pick one.

Development model:
This requires a two-part response. Is the open source code developed in public, in private, or a combination of the two (public/private)? Pick one.
Is the development effort dominated my employees of a vendor, or the result of true community collaboration, or an aggregate of multiple projects? Pick one.

Copyright:
Who owns the copyright for the open source code? Is it the vendor in question, a foundation, a distributed collection of companies/individuals, or another company (withheld)? Normally this would be a matter of picking one of the four options, although if a portion of the copyright is withheld, that could be used along with one of the other three.

Do your worst.

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