Open Source advantages - lessons from 10gen and MongoDB | Hacker News Reader

Open Source advantages - lessons from 10gen and MongoDB

noshpetigara.com

34 pointsnosh4 comments

Interesting. Seems lots of similar companies doing this. Appcelerator / Sencha come to mind as I work with their products. Sencha seems to have the same arrangement as 10gen license wise (I think), yet they get massive amounts of shit since they started with BSD and then switched later to GPL (with commercial license for commercial apps).

I don't think there's really enough examples to prove this to be a viable business model just yet. These companies seem to be mainly living off VC funding, hoping to get a MySQL style exit at some point.

Hopefully I'm wrong though and they are able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a company can build a lucrative business off an open source platform. Maybe there's enough examples out there (WordPress / others?) that it's already been proven.

> Naturally - there are still things we don’t share e.g. financing details, specifics of customer contracts, customer/partner proprietary information, etc.

And yet, it's the best-practices of monetizing an open-source product that I most want to read about from these kinds of articles.

I'll probably write up a more substantive post on open source business models at some point. We follow a fairly traditional model with training, consulting, and support being primary offerrings. If you look under products and services at http://10gen.com you will see pricing, etc.

In terms of best-practices, the first hurdle is to get your product used and demonstrating value. To do this you have to listen to your users and help them out to demonstrate that value (which is why the whole team is on our mailing list and IRC channel all the time). Generally when it comes to someone purchasing services from us, they have already tried out the product and may even have it in production. This is vastly different from a lot of closed source software where you end up in a long sales cycle just trying to convince customers to use it.

For databases, the training-consulting-support model works well. For other products, some other model may be more appropriate. We've also talked (both internally and externally) about closed-source addons/tools/features. Additionally there are potential revenue streams from hosted /cloud offerrings.

Although it doesn't seem like that(monetizing) was the intent of the article and instead a (brief)overview of different advantages, I agree. It would be nice to see some examples, case studies etc about that.

He did mention; "What’s interesting is that we don’t choose the division between free and paid (support, training, consulting, etc) - its the users who do that - based on how critical their applications are.", which seems to be the common way to monetize opensource/free products. It would have been nice if that was gone into a bit more.

Over all I did enjoy the article.

edit: nosh posted before this, disregard mine

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