

Open Source advantages - lessons from 10gen and MongoDB - nosh
http://noshpetigara.com/post/4750801615/open-source-advantages-lessons-from-10gen-and-mongodb

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jpcx01
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.

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chrisaycock
> 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.

~~~
nosh
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.

