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Let me point out a couple of things here.
First, I do think that the biggest open source
success stories were not people like Red Hat.
They were people who actually built and sold services that used
open source and obviously - it's a bunch of obvious players,
Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter,
they are all open source companies that
took open source to use to deliver service.
But there is an even more direct example,
the entire web hosting business,
very thin skin of selling DNS as a service,
selling WordPress as a service,
selling web, selling Apache as a service,
you have for a subscription fee.
And so, there is a pretty clear case where there was an open
source business model that was sitting in plain sight that
didn't look like the business model of a software company.
And I think it's really important to look a little sideways.
It was a wonderful talk at our Open Source Convention
once by a guy named Robert Lefkowitz,
goes by the name Rommel and he basically started in with
this long conversation about Sharia compliant mortgages,
which is - under Islam you can't loan money.
So he said basically that the Islamic banks,
he went through the two or three different
ways so they get around this,
they basically rent your house for 30 years and at
the end of 30 years they make a gift of it to you.
So there he kind of explains this and he says okay,
so now let me show you the P&L for
Borland versus the P&L for Red Hat.
And he says look the percentages are
identical all the way down the line.
There is only one difference.
This line says licenses and this line says subscriptions.
Sharia compliant mortgage.
Basically Red Hat it was the same business as Borland.
And so when you think about open source the most important thing
to think about is where do you get your business advantage?
Now there are open source business models where
you get your business advantage because,
hey, at least in the early days this is a great
way to get my software in people's hands.
But in the era of cloud that's actually not really
much of an advantage anymore because anybody can
get their software in other people's hands.
So that's really gone.
That was the idea from MySQL and the whole idea of dual licensing,
we build the market by letting anybody
use it then we will up-sell from there,
but today that - it's probably easy to do that
with a cloud app than it is with open source.
So you have to think I think a little bit harder about where you
get your business advantage and why you want open source it.
You might want to get contribution from users.
I don't know anything about your business.
The huge way to do it is,
is that with some other network effect that comes
into play as a result of your software.
Either you get a network effect because lots and lots
of people use it or because it produces data that
you are actually going to monetize, is another.
So there are a lot of answers,
but I would just urge you to think sideways,
and don't get caught in open source being a simple
variation on a business model where I would have
charged and I would have had a proprietary fee.