Open Source in Europe and the US - The Same and Different
I have worked for US software companies all of my working life but lived in Europe for the most part of my life. Over the last 3 and a half years at Alfresco it has been interesting to see the differences in European and US peoples opinions and approaches to open source. I have come out of meetings in one geography and said “I haven’t been asked that in years. I thought everybody took that for granted”. These differences were documented very well in Larry Augustin’s Weblog where he wrote about “Commercial Open Source in Europe Versus the US”. These were captured from the first Europe Open Source Think Tank (OSTT). In summary they are:
| Concept/Idea | European View | United States View |
| Primary reason for adopting Open Source. | Avoid vendor lock-in. | Cost. |
| Key driver of commercial Open Source business creation. | Creation of a local software industry. | Venture capital/entrepreneur driven to create a big business and make money for investors. |
| Dual licensing business models. | Not true open source. Proprietary business models using Open Source for PR and marketing. | Widely accepted as the most common Open Source business model. |
| Software sales model. | Channel oriented: VARs and SIs. | Direct. |
| Open Source business models. | Service and support subscription focused; 100% open source software. | US companies don’t want to be in the services business. The focus is on products, typically proprietary add-ons or an Enterprise Edition paired with an Open Source product edition. |
| Expectations around “Open Source” products. | All code is available under Open Source. There is often a community governance of community participation model. | Same, but not necessarily all products are available under an Open Source license. Commercially licensed versions of the products are commonly available. Projects are managed by a commercial vendor. |
Larry points out that US buyers want “better, cheaper software and a better relationship with vendors;” all of which Open Source helps create for them. He also points out that “The European community sees those benefits, but in addition recognizes that the Open Source nature of the code is the driving factor behind those benefits.”
As I have written about in previous posts:
- Open Source with commercial Service Level Agreements in a typical enterprise configuration saves between 89% to 96% for Enterprise Content Management. - Lower cost
- To reduce the cost of software today you need not just lower cost for the software you are buying but also be able to choose the lowest cost software stack to run it. Avoiding vendor lock-in is core to lower prices today and lower prices tomorrow. Stack wars tie a customer not just to one product but a whole stack. - Avoiding vendor lock-in and therefore lowering cost
Commercial open source has been the driver to enable:
- Reusing existing software, hardware and skills - Avoiding vendor lock-in and therefore lowering cost
- New fair usage pricing models that can be driven out of op ex as opposed to cap ex - Lowering the cost of money
So lowering vendor cost and avoiding lock-in go hand-in-hand with the same goal. A common phrase about the US and the UK is two countries separated by a common language. Maybe “Reduced Cost” and “Avoiding Vendor Lock-in” is the same thing - but in a different language.
Tags: cost, lock-in, lower cost, lowercost lock-in
February 19th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
Thanks for this insightful & helpful comparison. Why & how it helps me: American with career 50-50 Europe-SiliconValley. New to OSS as CEO building Bacula Systems with the architect & project manager Kern Sibbald (formerly AutoDesk founder and author of much of AutoCAD).
This helps me model the ecosystem and the “refinery process” of serving the community while providing professional services and SLA support to commercial users backing up mission critical data. I’m “close” to tying the ecosystem model to our CRM so we can serve the community and build revenue simultaneously.
Wish us luck!