Proprietary Open Source Proprietary Open Source Proprietary Open Source Proprietary Open Source…there, Marc said it, so I can also ;-)
Matt will say:
“OK. “Words, words, words,” as Hamlet might say. I’m not worried about the nomenclature here.”
Interesting, just nomenclature eh? Imagine this situation:
- I buy a license for RHEL
- I find a bug or want a new feature
- Lucky for me, I have the source code to RHEL
- I also have the technical skills to pay the billz
- I fix the bug and add that new feature to my copy of RHEL
- I no longer have RHEL, I have RHEL*
Can I get support for RHEL* from Red Hat? A candy bar to readers who answer, “nope, you’re out of luck, Red Hat won’t support you on anything other than RHEL (i.e. RHEL* != RHEL)”.
I don’t know about every commercial OSS product out there, but the above situation holds for more OSS products than you’d think. And you’d be surprised to find several leading OSS vendors whose Proprietary Open Source products are Proprietary and closed source (so you’d be stuck at #2 above). Don’t take my word for it. If you’re interested spend a few minutes checking out the product pages of the most popular commercial OSS vendors.
Look, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the Proprietary Open Source model. I have stressed the value of products and tried to explain that support minimizes the value of the product itself.
If support is the item of value that OSS vendors deliver why gate access to OSS/OSS-based products? Why have higher-value features in the gated products? Why offer these higher-value products under a proprietary license? (Note, not all OSS vendors utilize all 3 of these tactics…some do, some use only 1 or 2 of these tactics to encourage customers to pay for value).
There is nothing wrong for OSS vendors to expect that customers receiving value pay for the value received. The best way to convince these customers to “pay for value” is through a Proprietary Open Source product.
Let me repeat, there is nothing wrong with Proprietary Open Source. I just wish more OSS vendors and OSS proponents were more transparent about the business model that works, and the resulting customer impact.
rand($thoughts); 
01.31.08 at 9:43 am
[…] Mr. Buzzword for February appears to be proprietary open source. […]
02.03.08 at 7:04 am
This model is less better than the really open source model but it is still open source and
and it’s good in two cases
1- if you big as you can support your self in future
2- if the mother company die and another company wants to resume the way
02.03.08 at 10:30 pm
[…] and this short article isn’t about any kind of FUD at all, just a quick response to an interesting article I stumbled across, and felt I needed to just make a point about it; Interesting, just nomenclature eh? Imagine this […]
02.05.08 at 1:53 am
You can make RHEL+1=RHEL* if you push it to Red Hat. GPL works not only because it forces you to share your changes, but it is best way if you expect others to support your changes.
02.11.08 at 6:07 am
Hi Savio, you raised a very important issue in my opinion. Few days ago I wrote a post about FLOSSology and FOSSBazaar and I was just suggesting them to consider to offer Red Hat customers support for RHEL*.. ;-)
04.24.09 at 11:17 am
You cannot expect any company to support/troubleshoot code that YOU wrote and added to their existing codebase as a one-off. It’s ludicrous to think otherwise.
However, what opensource DOES provide that proprietary does NOT is the ability to look under the covers, make those changes if you cannot live without them, and submit those changes back into the open source project for consideration to be included in the next release.
This is the difference… and the difference is HUGE!