Ohloh
Abigail made a post linking to this article and asking how a company could make money on open source. Before I read the article, I thought that the company probably sold a product to evaluate free software, a bit like RedHat selling a distro of free software. However, it looks like Ohloh is a free service, not only in public beta, but even after release. What, then, do they plan to do?
First, you will notice near the end of the article that they plan to make a for-pay service for evaluating proprietary software. The free one, I suppose, will serve as a demo for the one that is not. Also, I notice that the founders of this company are, at least largely, from Microsoft, two men who were pretty high up in Microsoft's decision-making processes, and two "development managers"—for all I know, a development manager is one step above a developer, but I really don't know. Perhaps a someone can enlighten me. At any rate, Microsoft's upper management is not well-known for its tender love of all things open source. I've been told that Microsoft developers are forbidden to touch it. It seems unlikely to me that Ohloh would be a boon to the open source movement, just based on that.
So Ohloh offers a free service for evaluating open source projects, and a for-pay service for evaluating propreitary solutions. Now, if they can move you from the free service to the paid service, they score, I think, two points, and not just one. Not only do they get you to pay them money, but they move you away from open source and towards proprietary solutions, the territory where Microsoft feels the most comfortable.
How would they accomplish that? Somehow, they would need to build confidence in the service itself, while at the same time pushing customers away from any open source offering. A good example strategy involves numbers: a ranking service is quite likely to offer scores of different options, not only in the composite, but in specific figures such as "Reliability" or "Support". They can show a client several different open source projects, the top picks from all the rankings, and point out how one product shines in Reliability, another in Support. However, they can also point out how slight the difference is, and how low the numbers are compared to what might be desirable. "With a reliability ranking like that, they would take at least 3 weeks to help you. Can you imagine having your production servers go down and waiting 3 weeks for some hobby programmer to get around to helping you?" Then, as a sort of free bonus, they show the ratings on one or two proprietary programs. "Look at this one. The reliability score is 3 times higher than the highest one you saw there. And that isn't even the best one. If you'd like, I could go over some of the proprietary options that are available." For a fee, of course. In fact, the proprietary service could be quite profitable, especially if it involved a commission. Now, the client has got a good explanation of where the numbers came from, and the service seems trustworthy enough to him, and it's even predictable enough to try to get him to spend money. Having been honestly offered a choice from among several open source projects, he may feel that he has been narrowly saved from making a dangerous mistake, and gladly pay for the service so that he can take a proprietary option.
That's what Ohloh looks like to me. Drawing people from a free demo to a paid service is a standard business practice. Drawing companies away from open source software to proprietary software is just the kind of thing Microsoft would want to do. Perhaps I should be more trusting of these brave entrepreneurs, but the explanation that I've given makes a lot more sense to me.
First, you will notice near the end of the article that they plan to make a for-pay service for evaluating proprietary software. The free one, I suppose, will serve as a demo for the one that is not. Also, I notice that the founders of this company are, at least largely, from Microsoft, two men who were pretty high up in Microsoft's decision-making processes, and two "development managers"—for all I know, a development manager is one step above a developer, but I really don't know. Perhaps a someone can enlighten me. At any rate, Microsoft's upper management is not well-known for its tender love of all things open source. I've been told that Microsoft developers are forbidden to touch it. It seems unlikely to me that Ohloh would be a boon to the open source movement, just based on that.
So Ohloh offers a free service for evaluating open source projects, and a for-pay service for evaluating propreitary solutions. Now, if they can move you from the free service to the paid service, they score, I think, two points, and not just one. Not only do they get you to pay them money, but they move you away from open source and towards proprietary solutions, the territory where Microsoft feels the most comfortable.
How would they accomplish that? Somehow, they would need to build confidence in the service itself, while at the same time pushing customers away from any open source offering. A good example strategy involves numbers: a ranking service is quite likely to offer scores of different options, not only in the composite, but in specific figures such as "Reliability" or "Support". They can show a client several different open source projects, the top picks from all the rankings, and point out how one product shines in Reliability, another in Support. However, they can also point out how slight the difference is, and how low the numbers are compared to what might be desirable. "With a reliability ranking like that, they would take at least 3 weeks to help you. Can you imagine having your production servers go down and waiting 3 weeks for some hobby programmer to get around to helping you?" Then, as a sort of free bonus, they show the ratings on one or two proprietary programs. "Look at this one. The reliability score is 3 times higher than the highest one you saw there. And that isn't even the best one. If you'd like, I could go over some of the proprietary options that are available." For a fee, of course. In fact, the proprietary service could be quite profitable, especially if it involved a commission. Now, the client has got a good explanation of where the numbers came from, and the service seems trustworthy enough to him, and it's even predictable enough to try to get him to spend money. Having been honestly offered a choice from among several open source projects, he may feel that he has been narrowly saved from making a dangerous mistake, and gladly pay for the service so that he can take a proprietary option.
That's what Ohloh looks like to me. Drawing people from a free demo to a paid service is a standard business practice. Drawing companies away from open source software to proprietary software is just the kind of thing Microsoft would want to do. Perhaps I should be more trusting of these brave entrepreneurs, but the explanation that I've given makes a lot more sense to me.
posted by Soaring Gryphon | 12:21 AM
2 Comments:
On the other hand, ex-Softies might be really tired of the software game, already have their millions of dollars from stock options, and not really care if the business makes money. But I don't buy that, either, because how else could they get others to pony up the venture capital?
Well first off, there is a well known business model that gets everyone else to pony up lots of money that you blow of awesome offices, sweet vacations, and other toys w/o ever making any money ... we call this the Prodigal Son model ... it has been around a long time.
Second off, who really cares if they are out to make money or not ... they are ex-Softies starting a company ... its safe to assume they want money and that is ok.
As far as an FLOSS dev's perspective ... honestly I saw the headline on slashdot a few weeks ago and did not read any further. I have a very good algorythim for finding new software stacks, it uses emergent behavior, human intellegence, and other cool tech buzz words. I ask my friends. I have enough friends that do enough different work that I can generally send an email or two and find whatever tool I need.
This really is about providing a service to MS Developers, who want to know if they should use opensource libraries or not. I don't really care, all the work I do is Free Software (and its not much work anymore ... am a minster not a coder most of the time). I don't have to balence the cost of using a library with the cost of maybe having to share the code I developed. I share it all. Its far easier.
One more fun link:
http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/ols_2006_keynote.html
the best introduction to the linux kernel I have read in a while. We are a whole diff world ... come join the Kingdom ;)
Post a Comment
<< Home