The 'Brave New World' of Open Source

Hi!

I have been in the computer industry since January 1967. So I¹ve seen a lot
of change ­ probably more than most people still actively involved today.
That doesn¹t make me any smarter, just persistent!

After the recent debate about commercialism within the PostgreSQL community,
it got me thinking about how businesses should behave in the brave new world
of open source. Here is a summary of how that debate influenced the
direction of our business. I hope it is helpful to others and not thought
off topic for this forum.

I decided that we needed to change our thinking at once:technologies to fit
better within the open source world. There were two main reasons for this:

Having one foot in the commercial licensing camp and one in the open source
camp leads to a Œcorporate split personality¹. Our business model became
much clearer when the focus changed to one approach. This doesn¹t mean that
we¹ll drop commercial licences completely. There are developers using the
once:radix platform who don¹t want their applications released under the
GPL. As a tools developer, we continue to support all Œsoftware religions¹;
though in time, I expect this to change. I¹d be surprised to see commercial
software licensing survive beyond the next decade.

When Microsoft goes open source, watch out!

The second motivation came to me just recently. I opened a Woolworths sales
catalogue ­ something I seldom do. There, next to the kids¹ pyjamas and cans
of peaches, was a 1 TB disk drive selling for $139. It struck me that
hardware and software had become a commodity. It is expertise, knowledge and
skills that people are prepared to pay for. Why? To save time and
frustration, to improve productivity/reduce costs, and to reduce risk.

We are releasing the new version of once:radix in the next couple of weeks.
Given its unique position as the only browser-based Rapid Application
Development environment, we hope this move will bring some direct benefit to
the profile of PostgreSQL ­ the only database that we support.

Even more significantly, we are releasing our flagship ERP system ­
once:fabrik ­ as an open source project. This is NOT some lightweight
application that lacks substantial value. It has been selling for
$10,000­100,000 per site and is used in businesses ranging from SMEs to
large corporations, banks and government departments.

For us to assist a business to install a system will come at a cost. But it
will be substantially less than it has been. So why would we cut our margins
and open the way for others to use our IP? In a commodity market, margins
are reduced but volume increases dramatically. So instead of being a
boutique software business, we hope to become a much larger training and
support organisation.

The downside of growing market size is having to deal with the problems of
managing a larger team of people. Call me crazy but I LIKE being small. The
once:radix development team never exceeded six people. In a large
organisation, it would have taken at least 60 to build it!

To grow without needing large amounts of capital and people, we hope to
recruit independent ISVs and VARs to share the opportunities and the
challenges.

This is the opportunity that the Brave New World of open source creates for
small software developers.

Josh Berkus told me at OSCON 2007 that it would take time to develop our
open source strategy. He was right. It has taken six years for our
technology to reach maturity and two years for our business model. Is this
another application of Moore¹s Law?

Regards

Rob Napier