If the recent debate about open core licensing has proven one thing, it is that the issue of combining proprietary and open source code continues to be a controversial one.
It ought to be simple: either the software meets the Open Source Definition or it does not. But it is not always easy to tell what license is being used, and in the case of software being delivered as a service, does it matter anyway?
The ability to deliver software as a hosted service enables some companies that are claimed to be 100% open source to offer customers software for which the source code is not available. Coincidentally, James Dixon has this week highlighted one example in the form of Nuxeo Studio, a configuration and customization environment for the Nuxeo ECM offerings, which is delivered as a hosted service to Nuxeo’s Connect – Developer subscribers.
The nature of Studio’s license came up in a conversation I had recently with Nuxeo CMO Cheryl McKinnon, and I had been meaning to write a post on the subject of hosted subscription services ever since.
Nuxeo Studio is the latest in a line of value-added subscription services that blur the lines between open and closed. It started, arguably, back in 2001 with Red Hat Network, a hosted monitoring and management service. The stand alone Red Hat Network Satellite followed two years later but it wasn’t until June 2008 that the code officially became open source, as project Spacewalk.
Similarly, JBoss Operations Network was first introduced as JBoss Network, part of the JBoss subscription, in March 2005. The code for that was made available in the form of the Jopr project in 2008.
Meanwhile MySQL introduced MySQL Network Monitoring and Advisory Services as part of MySQL Enterprise in October 2006 as it continued its shift towards subscription revenue (and away from its traditional dual licensing approach).
More recent examples include Nuxeo Studio and Acquia Network’s remote site management services.
In his post James Dixon argues that the delivery of a service like Nuxeo Studio is effectively the same as the open core licensing model, in that it is the delivery of proprietary extensions to an open source core. Florent Guillaume, director of R&D at Nuxeo, and Eric Barroca, Nuxeo CEO, have responded in the comments to that post and Eric’s original to argue that it is not.
My own feeling is that Nuxeo’s approach is not open core, since the original definition of open core concerned proprietary products. However, the existence of Nuxeo Studio means that Nuxeo is clearly not 100% open source.
For that reason, I have come to believe that we need to add a new revenue trigger category to our open source business strategy model, that makes a clear distinction between support subscriptions for 100% open source code, and value-add subscriptions that offer additional hosted services.
It is also a reminder of the importance of transparency. Open core vendors are regularly attacked for misleading potential customers with the promise of open source while delivering traditional licensing. Our recent transparency test indicated that for the most part open core vendors are clear about what features are in which version, and with which license.
I spent some time the other day investigating the web sites of various OSS-related vendors and unfortunately the same cannot be said of all vendors (whether they are open core or “pure” open source).
Too often phrases like “open source subscription license”, “commercial open source license” and “value-added component” are thrown around without any explanation of what exactly is meant, and the so-called open source purists are not immune to glossing over the details.
Simon Crosby recently commented that everybody making money with open source actually has a proprietary angle. I don’t think that is 100% true, but it is getting harder and harder to identify the open source purists.
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