As written in one of my last posts, I took the time during vacation for thinking about some lessons I have learned while building an open source company. In this post I want to give an overview of the facts I have learned. I start with the strategies you can choose as your way of leveraging open source (BTW there are many others, non-open-source strategies, that can lead to success, depending on your market and product) and discuss the benefits that result from the several strategies. Afterwards I explain what you need to consider if you build your business upon open source software.
Open Source Strategies
The first strategy is to leverage the huge amount of open source software available to be more productive (eg. from ASF). I call this the Use OSS strategy. In this case you use OSS software (OK, the name isn't very fancy) as part of your product to speed up development, which in turn can lead to cost savings and better/faster time to market. In detail this means that the usage of OSS frameworks and tools can help you to concentrate on your costumer needs, products and features instead of the many technical challenges you might face like database connections or application workflow.
In case that you want to be a real OSS company and decide to let others participate in your development, you will gain additional benefits like community support for finding and fixing bugs, feedback about useful functions or usability issues. I call this the Be OSS strategy which includes (under normal circumstances) the Use OSS strategy.
Benefits of OSS Strategies
As already mentioned, there are some benefits of OSS strategies that allow you to outsource some of your efforts. But there are additional benefits that might not be obvious. Hiring the right people for your company can be much easier, because there are so many open source developers that work as freelancers and often there is a good chance that you find somebody who is already familiar with many parts of your code (because you use OSS frameworks he already has worked with). In addition you can review the public available sources of an employment candidate which allows you to evaluate the quality of work he is able to provide.
Another benefit of the Be OSS strategy is the opportunity to introduce your product in a global scale, because the possibility for others to participate in the development can lead to many freelancers and small/medium companies that provide local support for users and customers of your products. You can call this the long tail of open source business (according to the famous book "The Long Tail" written by Chris Anderson). But you should be careful with that, because if you are not able to manage partnerships with such local supporters, this can lead to a loss of customer contacts and even if your startup is not able to support customers all over the world, you should know about them. One possibility to handle this problem is to establish a brand name and to license local partners if they want to provide services for your products.
Pitfalls of OSS Strategies
Besides the pretty sounding benefits, there are also some things that need to be considered for a successful open source strategy.
You should use the benefits of fast development and reuse of existing code and frameworks to concentrate on the most important tasks for your product, which means features, quality and usability. One way to evaluate and define those aspects that has proven to work is user-centered design. You can read about our experiences with UCD in Alex weblog. It is always good to provide fixes and patches for open source projects you use, but don't stuck in development of features that are not related to your product.
For that reason it is very important to do a due diligence for open source projects, before you start using them. Some things that need to be considered are:
- Is the projects license compatible with my products license?
- How big is the community of the project and how active is it (eg. date of last mailing list entry)?
- Does anybody else use the project?
- How often do they release and how old is the last release?
- ... (and other questions that might be important for you)
Another important issue is the management of your open source project. Even if many non-commercial open source projects work on an democratic basis, your project needs management to provide reliability for your customers. Thus you should think about development cycles as well as release and build management. Anyway there are a lot of good open source projects, which processes can be used as a basis for your project.
Last friday Lars and I received our master grade in software systems engineering at the public graduation ceremony of the HPI. It was very impressive to see all those young and highly skilled software engineers that will start working now. You may ask: What, those guys didn't finish their studies up to now? Yes, that's true. In the beginning of 2006 we saw that it was the right time to start development of a product like the Mindquarry Collaboration Server. Therefore we decided to start Mindquarry even if our studies were not finished.
During the last months it was very hard to work for Mindquarry full time and write my master thesis at the weekend. But finally all this hard work was rewarded with the promising start of Mindquarry and a very good master grade. Below you can see a picture of me with robe, cap and sash that was made by a professional photographer after the ceremony.
At the graduation ceremony, Prof Scheer former member of the SAP supervisory board and founder of IDS Scheer gave a talk about transfering knowledge from university to the real world. While his presentation was more a kind of story telling about the way of IDS Scheer towards business process management consulting, there was one slide which was really impressive. On this slide Prof. Scheer showed his opinion about the ideal mixture for an entreprenerial team. The main characters you need in your team are:
- Albert Einstein for analytical and visionary thinking,
- James Bond for flexibility and fighting spirit,
- Willi Brand for showing that you are serous and believable, and finally
- Daniel Düsentrieb for getting things done on the technical side.
If you know us, I let it up to you to decide which one of us fits into which category...