Turbocharged

Some misconceptions refuse to die. And, worst of all, these misconceptions are harming our community and harming us, directly. I’m talking about a two-headed beast:

1. That Open Source projects cannot (or should not) be repackaged and sold by third parties
2. That Open Source products’ tech support is worthless

Keep reading to find out how I’ve personally experienced this monster on my business.

Standard disclaimer — before you read on, you need to know this: during the course of this article, I’ll use Turbocharged as an example of an Open Source project. You could replace it by any other commercial endeavor based on Open Source, but since I live and breathe Turbocharged, I’ll write about it.

While doing the monthly Turbocharged buzz around the Web review, I discovered this page (it’s in Spanish). To summarize the argument:

• The author thinks Turbocharged is “just a bunch” of plugins cobbled together
• A few commenters on that post thought Turbocharged is a rip-off of third party plugins

I took the time to respond hands-on to the site but, let me tell you, it’s hard to battle ingrown misconceptions. Through this article, I’ll make an effort to dispel these myths.

Turbocharged is an Open Source project. It’s rather unique in the sense that customers need to purchase it first (in this sense it’s much like Red Hat Enterprise). But (nearly all of) it is still distributed under an Open Source license.

The value in commercial Open Source projects

We’ve put engineering work into creating a convenient bundle for our customers. Yes, we use third-party tools. Those are licensed under Open Source terms, and we review their licenses carefully. before considering them for inclusion — after all, one advantage of our products is the QA work, which includes copyright licensing concerns. This lets our customers be safe against copyright infringement claims. This is point one.

Point two: we have undertaken a massive live debugging effort of all components in Turbocharged. How? Simple. We run each component each time it’s upgraded, and most of them are live in our network of Web sites. In essence, we take the hit so your sites don’t have to.

Point three: we think our support has value right from the outset. We routinely sell support and consulting at $45 an hour, which is a steal for First World countries. Think about it: you pay $50 for Turbocharged, and you get three support incidents, which average one hour each. Even if a customer doesn’t need it, the software itself (and its opportunity cost) represents way more than $50.

Licensing delusions

Let me return to licensing again: selling Open Source is neither wrong or a crime. Many people live under the bizarre delusion that selling third-party OSS or GPLed software is a crime, or against the spirit of the license. This is a mistake. All OSI-certified licenses allow for selling the software, even by third parties. The GPL family of licenses even make this explicitly permitted.

The point is: if:

• we find a magnificent piece of software that fits right into Turbocharged, and
• we think it would benefit our customers, and
• the license allows for it

we’ll bundle it into Turbocharged on the spot. If a plugin writer doesn’t want his work redistributed, he should distribute it under a license that forbids it. Denis de Bernardy (hi Denis, I’m sending you some traffic) does that, and we respect his right to distribute his work under any license. No Open Source developer may turn around and say we unfairly profited from his efforts, because he licensed his work under an OSS license in the first place.

And the worst part is: the misconception is not on the developers’ part. It’s on the users’ heads. Yes, those who are supposed to be our customers. Some of them think we Open Sourcers live a communist delusion where everything should be unpaid and free. How on Earth do you fight that?

Please ask yourself: what do Red Hat and Novell/SUSE sell? That’s right, Open Source software bundles. Their core business model is exactly like mine and many others. Do you still think it’s wrong?

Conclusions

Bottom line is: commercial Open Source projects still have a long way to go until these misconceptions stop being barriers to entry. I’m doing my part to dispel them. What are you doing?

Oh! Hello! Glad to see you here. Perhaps I can interest you in Turbocharged? I won’t say a bit about it — make up your own mind

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 11th, 2006 at 6:34 pm and is filed under Turbocharged buzz on the Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.