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To the Core

The problem for venture capital funded open source companies is the pressure to maximise returns. Lampitt's proposal for an Open Core Licensing model aims to resolve the conflicting tensions between the commercial pressures on vendors and the use of the term "open source". From the point of view of a open source business which owns the copyright on the code, the shorthand version of his proposal is that:

• Make the core GPL; if a customer wants to embed the GPL in closed source they need to pay for a non-GPL licence
• Offer technical support of GPL product for a fee
• Include indemnity, technical support, and additional features and/or platform support as part of the commercial subscription offering
• Considering the possibility of the additional commercial features having viewable or closed source which could become GPL after period of time
• Offering paid for professional services and training

The idea is to create software that is mainly open source, but is enclosed in a proprietary shell or contains closed source plug-ins. The proprietary code may or may not be released at a later date.

The code is "open source" at the core, and is developed in cooperation with the community, with a proprietary shell or plug-ins, which differentiate the commercial package from the freely downloadable version. For the advocates of Open Core Licensing this is a virtue because, in Lampitt's view, they have "a way to more effectively monetise the large, open source communities by charging for the significant extra value that they are delivering to the customers."

The approach is opportunistic and paternalistic. The benefits go to the vendor, who reaps rewards from the developer community, but the "commercially available extensions" are not available to the community except under a restrictive license. Open core is essentially a work-around for the problem of being open source while not being open source.

Open core satisfies the venture capitalists' notion of open source, while ensuring the primary goal of maximising profits. The justification is the same as that encountered by Tiemann in the early days of Cygnus - "It's a great idea, but it will never work, because nobody is going to pay money for free software."

Tarus Balog Just as pertinently, Tarus Balog of OpenNMS observes that the effect of this model is that the open core, shorn of its commercially licensed extensions, is little different in character to a shareware application. "The 'free' version does some things, but it is the full featured version that most people need." The temptation is to write your own extensions and make the software completely free.

Balog has his own test to decide whether a product is open source or not. "When thinking about a purchase of the paid or 'enterprise' version of something labelled open source software," he writes, "ask yourself 'does it pass the CentOS test?' Examine the license to see if it would be possible for you to take the source code, compile it and distribute it. If you can, I claim it is likely the software is truly open. If not, then you are looking at commercial software, with all of its limitations."

A Spoonful of Sugar

Where companies like Cygnus Support made a virtue out of marketing free software, recent history has seen a number of "open source" start-ups struggling to define their role and looking to 'own' the software by other means, with license clauses and branding, "mixed source" solutions or dual licensing strategies.

SugarCRM is an applications software company that followed the example of JBoss and the Linux distributions in making a business of promoting and marketing free software, but encountered problems with its licensing regime.

SugarCRM was originally licensed under an attribution license (the Sugar Public License) which met with resistance from its own developer community because of license compatibility issues. The attribution clause required any derivatives to display the SugarCRM logo. Incompatibilities with the GPL meant that SugarCRM code could not access the wider ecosystem of GPL software.

Pressure from developers led SugarCRM to make the radical switch to version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPL) because, according to Clint Oram of Sugar "The GPL creates a very level playing field for everybody involved, for those people who take the time and effort to build the core software initially, as well as the people who leverage that to build new and exciting ideas into the software... We think its going to accelerate the innovation and interaction of our own community with other open source development communities around the world... There is more code out there, and there are more developers working under the GPL than under the SPL."

Nonetheless, SugarCRM is pursuing an Open Core business model, releasing the core code under the GPLv3, while retaining commercially available extensions under restricted licenses.

Next: Compromised

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