Peter Yared wrote recently a BusinessWeek guest blog post called “Failure of Commercial Open Source Software.” Not surprisingly his post caused a lot of angry replies from people who work for COSS companies. “The emperor is not naked” they argued.
I believe that the COSS emperor is openly naked. And the discussion shouldn’t be whether COSS is a complete or a partial failure just because there are few successful exits that Peter neglected to mention. At the end of the day Peter’s comment that “selling software is miserable” is true. Every sales rep involved in selling COSS would agree (I’m interviewing many of them now). Selling COSS is no easier than selling any other form of software.
Any company using the word “open” should be able to explain the true cost of delivery (this is one of Peter’s points). And there is an obvious litmus test of openness of COSS companies: One that I would call “open pricing.” COSS companies should openly publish their price list and clearly mark what’s free and open and what’s paid and closed. Otherwise OSS is just a bait-and-switch to a familiar proprietary software tactic of customer lock-in. This is what OSS was supposed to get rid of in the first place.
Let’s take a look at some of COSS companies in the Business Intelligence space. The bait and switch is in a full swing here:
Jaspersoft: https://www.jaspersoft.com/jaspersoft-business-intelligence-suite-0 Let us prepare a custom quote for you.
Pentaho: http://www.pentaho.com/products/buy_bi_suite.php Request a Quote
Talend: http://www.talend.com/store/talend-store-inquiries.php A Talend account manager will be in touch shortly to provide information and/or a detailed quote.
We announced GoodData pricing earlier today and I would actually argue that we are a more open company than any of companies listed above. Our customers know exactly what service they get and how much it will cost.
We stick to our company motto: GoodData = BI – BS. And at there is a lot of BS going on in COSS space. It may actually be its biggest failure.
Full disclosure: I have been a big believer in open source since we opensourced NetBeans more than 10 years ago.
@Roman: and how surprising is it that you only look at companies that compete directly with GoodData? You make it sound as if only BI COSS players don’t publish their price lists on the Web.
We just had an interesting debate with Vincent McBurney on Merv Adrian’s blog at http://mervadrian.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/talend-uses-open-source-and-community-to-transform-data-integration/#comments (scroll down to comment #31). This makes for good reading.
At the end of the day, being open means a lot more (and something very different) than publishing a price list on your web site. Your price list is open – good for you. BTW Expressor makes the same claim. But what else is open at GoodData? Your source code? Your development process? Can a user try your solution without paying or leaving contact info?
I happen to believe that SaaS is also a good way to deliver value to customers. COSS and SaaS are two great alternative models to the traditional licensing model, and serve different needs. And as I told numerous times my friends at Pentaho: let’s go after the proprietary vendors – and not waste time fighting one another. The cake is big enough for everyone!
Be open any way you feel. But don’t pick the wrong target.
Yves, if I may address your questions:
“Can a user try your solution without paying or leaving contact info?” – You betcha. If you really want to be anonymous, go get yourself a dummy email address and go to town. No problemo.
“But what else is open at GoodData? Your source code? Your development process?”
I don’t think anyone would possibly be interested in seeing the source code but on the dev process, I’m happy to share that with you and as a matter of fact we make no secret of the fact we’re an agile shop with a 2 week scrum cycle.
Best,
J.
Thank you stating your viewpoint. Its important for your readers to realize that there are many more perspectives.
Being open is not as simple as publishing a price list. Open is about open access to the product, being able to make modifications, etc.
The pricing is only one element of “open”
I wonder how do you define open access. The three links I listed in my article don’t look like open access to me. And I am also not sure anybody can make modifications to closed source product packages that COSS vendors sell…
Hi Roman, great post… you are of course going to get a bunch of irrational responses. The fact remains that these companies are selling PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE with DIRECT SALES REPS and WITHOUT PUBLISHED PRICING. Having the equivalent of a trial version that includes source code does not change these fundamental facts. Peter
@Jerome – If your definition of openness is “fill out fake info in our forms”, you’re going to need a good data quality tool for your CRM. I know of a great open source data profiler, 100% free, and you can download it without filling out any forms, at http://www.talend.com/download.php.
I am glad for you that you guys are an agile development shop, but stating this isn’t the same thing as letting people review your source code (or fork it if they wish to).
@Roman, @Peter – There is a clear difference in what you can do (in terms of usage and source code access) with the free open source version and the commercial version. The open source version is NOT a trial version, it is a real product that provides value and is really open (check our site for user testimonials, many of them use the free product). The proceeds from the commercial version funds the development of both the open source and commercial products. And no, unless you are a client, you don’t get access to this part of the source code.
BTW, COSS companies are not philanthropies… and the open core model that we use, along with many other vendors, has proven to be a pretty good one for providing value, to users and vendors alike. I think SaaS & Cloud also provide value, although the model isn’t as clearly proven. But GoodData is going to change this
@Yves, I am not suggesting people should fill out bogus info. You asked ““Can a user try your solution without paying or leaving contact info?” and the answer is yes as I don’t consider bogus emails “contact info” –
So can we insert and then mine such customers into a sane CRM for later use? Of course not, but people are free to do this if they want. That’s one of the risks an open shop takes – incidentally, I can tell you it’s fairly rare when this happens. People tend to use valid creds because they want the support that comes with a GoodData account anyway.
Additionally, they tend to like and leverage our collaboration features and invite colleagues to their BI projects – So overall there is very little “bogus” info coming in for our signups.
I’ve never understood what “reviewing” some vendor’s source code can possibly bring to the table – unless I’m intellectually curious as a developer well versed in the language/platform being used. As a user, please tell me why I give a hoot about your source code? And as a user, believe me the last thing I want to do is muck with thousands of lines of your code! I want something I can use _now_, not a Rubik’s cube.
How many people have actually forked your product? Where are they and what additions/modifications have they brought? Talend is a highly rich and complex product (I think you would agree) – where is the value of my being able to “see” your source code?
It’s like trusting your money to a bank based on being able to examine their mainframe code. Who cares? – unless you’re a Cobol hacker
Roman,
The ire that you seem to have drawn from some of the adjacent BI players perhaps distracts from the central point here, which is that OSS is a massive force multiplier for its users, but most COSS pricing schemes put a brake on the real benefits.
Linux was perhaps the first piece of OSS to be successful in the commercial environment, but most of the COSS plays that rose around it were execrable – they took an abusive closed source model of per CPU licensing+S&M, spun the balance between ‘licensing’ and ‘S&M’ just enough for the whole deal to be a bit cheaper and pretty much carried on as before. As a result the only people getting the true benefits are those that are too small to care about S&M (e.g. startups) and those that are large enough to look after themselves (e.g. Google); that is until Canonical came along with a new model.
The trouble here is that OSS businesses really should be about support (and custom development), but such businesses don’t scale well as they’re heavily manpower dependent. Of course there have been a lucky few who’ve managed to spin their professional services company that does OSS support and dev to look like a software company in order to achieve high growth and a nice multiple on exit. These however should be viewed as the rare exceptions rather than the rule.
Of course (as you well know) the game is moving on. If you build a service company that scales by demand (users) rather than supply (headcount) then you can get similar (or better) multiples than a software company, and these days you can build much of the infrastructure of a service out of OSS and other people’s commodity services.
@Chris: “OSS businesses really should be about support”: says who?
@Jerome: No fork so far – but that’s because we are doing a good job at providing the features the community wants. And for the community, knowing they can do it if they have to is what’s important.
Which contributions did we get? Over 100 connectors, translation of the UI in 10 languages, a vibrant community support system (forum, bugtracker). Not bad I think.
Did I audit my bank’s Cobol code? No. But would I buy stock in a company that boasts that it does not need to be transparent in reporting and accountability? No. (somewhat bogus analogy I think, but you started it).
All right, my turn to throw you a curve ball: should (God forbid) GoodData go belly up, what guarantee do your users have about getting their data back? And about continuing to have access to mission critical systems they are relying on?
@Yves – It’s true you have a good ecosystems for connectors I suppose.
When Lucidera went belly up, GoodData offered their customers a safe harbor option and guess what, many of them took us up on it and are still with us to this day
No data was lost – But even with proprietary software, people have been known to negotiate source code escrows (specifically when dealing with startups) so I don’t think that’s a huge issue. In any case, the data would still exist in EC2 so it’s not like it disappears overnight. Additionally, in a SFDC integration case, the data lives in Salesforce right? It’s not “lost” overnight simply if a partner happens to expire I believe. In a CSV upload case (direct) the data is not lost either since clearly the user had it onsite – So I don’t believe that’s a significant issue or any more of a risk for them than for any other vendor.
Good discussion – Merci!
Inconvenience? Clearly – show stopper? I think not.
@yves what guarantees are you making about the source code for your commercial code in the case you go belly up? just because some people can use your open source program does not change that when people _pay_ they are using proprietary software. those customers are no different than Oracle customers.
@Peter – I don’t believe that Oracle is providing their source code to paying customers. We do.
A great discussion here. @Roman very impressed by your post. It’s very closely resembles situation in company I’m working in (European open source SOA, we are partnering with Talend, Intalio, Hyperic).
“Selling COSS is no easier than selling any other form of software.” <<< absolutely agree on that, though selling COSS in this place meaning selling "commercial version of OSS software" where OSS software is mostly downgraded to kind-of "demo-version". Obviously such sales model is very heavy-weight and expensive.
In my opinion however the OSS part of COSS is a kind-of door opener for most of the companies.
You call it door opener and I call it bait-and-switch. The same thing…
Where are your pricing Mr. Stanek? http://www.gooddata.com/products/pricing leadss to the broken page. Change of stance with time?