It's a balancing act between high-volume community adoption and enterprise differentiation. But if you do it right, the impact is huge One of the things that’s key in open source: It’s all about the volume, baby. When you’re selecting open source technology for use in your organization, you want to pay special attention to how popular the technology is. The more popular, the more likely the technology has been proven by others — hopefully in situations similar to what you’re planning. And if it’s widely adopted, you’re also likely to be able to get good support, add-on tools, technical expertise, documentation, best practices how-to tips, and so on. Of course, you shouldn’t base your decision only on popularity, but it is still an important consideration. The other side of the coin is that volume is also key for open source vendors. Why? Because most users of open source will never pay! And those that do pay are often paying 90 percent less than closed source solutions. So it’s got to be a high-volume model to work. In a down economy, open source has more appeal than ever, so I think volume will continue to increase for open source, making the model even stronger over time. My view is that when open source products are most successful (and most disruptive), they serve two distinct markets: a nonpaying community and a paying enterprise market. For a vendor to be successful it must compete in both markets. That means you need to understand and meet the needs of each market with special care to provide compelling reasons for enterprise customers to pay. There needs to be some value-add for enterprise customers to pay. It’s not always easy to come up with compelling differentiation for enterprise customers while at the same time making sure you don’t limit adoption in the community, but it can be done. And when it works, it’s like having a tiger by the tail. At MySQL, we came up with a model whereby the server is open source, but additional capabilities like the Enterprise Monitor and forthcoming Query Analysis are part of the Enterprise subscription. The open source server is fully functional without the added capabilities, but for an Enterprise customer, you can save a lot of time with the subscription. Other companies like Red Hat, SugarCRM, SpringSource, Alfresco, Pentaho, and MuleSource have come up with their own various models that balance adoption and differentiation. I don’t think there’s one perfect model; there will be different approaches for different products and different markets. Over the last few months, I’ve been helping to identify models for high-volume marketing and differentiation across a range of products in Sun’s portfolio. We’re taking some of the best practices from MySQL, from Sun, and from across the industry and applying them on a larger stage. So far, it’s been very gratifying. Open Source