Prem Kurian Philip wrote:
I was thinking about what it takes to make a FOSS product succeed
commercially. I am not sure if I am right about this, and so I am going to
be bouncing of a thought so that the rest of the ilug can comment.
Apart from the fact that the FOSS product must be good and at par with
purely propreitary offerings, some of the other ingredients required for
it to be successful commercially include:
1. Ecosystem:
It seems to me that if you need your product to be both FOSS and also
commercially viable, then you will necessarily need to develop an
ecosystem around it.
If a company comes up with a CRM product and they want to release it as a
FOSS product but yet want to generate a tidy profit, the different revenue
streams available to them are:
a) Charging for support (call center support, periodic service packs etc)
b) Charging for implementation
c) Sell consulting on the product. I see this as separate from pure
support because consulting implies extending the product, integration with
other products etc.
d) Sell commercial extensions.
e) Sell books etc to support other firms who may be keen on providing
these consulting services.
f) Sell training for firms who may be keen on providing these consulting
services.
g) Sell certification for individuals and firms for implementation,
consulting services etc.
h) Charging for the product itself. I am not much of a believer in this
option for FOSS products since if you are giving away the source, then
your competition can be selling your product too. Or alternatively, your
customer can just download the source off some website and you won't
receive any money for it unless one of the other revenue streams (a) to
(g) come into effect.
If you notice, almost all these points apart from (a),(b) and (h) requires
that the company first develop an entire community around the product. And
unless this community is created (and this process takes time), the FOSS
product cannot take off.
So the trick in selling an FOSS product is to figure out a way of
developing vibrant communities around this product and then keeping this
community alive and thriving. The ecosystem does not automatically develop
just because you provide the source for your product.
2. Extensibility via plugins / extensions / modules
The other important part would be that the product must support plugins or
extensions of some sort. This allows members in the community to also form
businesses around developing these extensions. I think this ties in with
point 1 - if it is not possible to develop these extensions, then it is
likely that the ecosystem will not be developed quite so easily.
Also, if the product has an "plugin/extension manager" for automatically
finding, downloading and installing these plugins, it definitely helps in
popularizing the product. Also, it helps to have a single website where
these extensions from the community are all aggregated and can be
reviewed/downloaded/updated etc.
3. Good documentation
I think this is self-explanatory.
Is there anything else? also, if there are other thoughts, please do write
in.
