A healthy open source project is a commercial interest that satisfies the “fame and fortune” of users, contributors, and commercial companies.
Yes, open source is becoming more and more popular and professional.
Open source has become a more and more clear and sustainable business model, and everyone has gradually accepted the topic of “open source commercialization”. In the abstract, there are only two types of people in open source. One is that the users (consumers) of open source products/services are mostly enterprises and public institutions; the other is that the contributors (producers) of open source products/services are mostly the editors and maintainers of code documents, community governance and operators. There are some pain points between these two players right now that I think are important and may even affect the health of open source.
On the user side, “high quality and low price” open source products are needed to solve the problems in work production, so as to reduce cost and increase efficiency. Based on this starting point, the user is in the use of an open source product may worry that problems encountered in the use process who can Bug me, especially my online to production if there is a problem, I can put the problem feedback to the open source community project, but due to various reasons community personnel can not be so fast as enterprise internal employees to solve problems, Or it may never be solved, and the loss to the business may be great; But now, “software is eating the whole world”. Every enterprise uses at least one piece of open source software, so should they hire special personnel to maintain it? Obviously not. Then the pain point of users is that “the use of open source software may bring uncontrollable risks and high costs”, the demand should be “cheap and good” open source products, including reliable after-sales support and guarantee.
On the contributor side, for a long time, many people will flash out halo words like “geek”, “feelings”, “passion” and “selfless dedication” when referring to open source. It is true that a lot of interesting and valuable open source products have been created. However, with the recognition of open source by more people in recent years, more and more people want to participate in open source. According to the Stack Overflow survey, not many people can actually participate in the open source contribution. The survey shows that many interviewees say that they take coding as a hobby, but do not choose to contribute to open source projects. Roughly the reason for this is “open source ideas unlimited, but open source contributions have many restrictions, have no time, basic free contribution”, thus leading to a lot of people just very amateur submit some contribution, such contributions do not necessarily will be adopted by advocates of open source projects, with the fast pace of life, a lot of people in addition to efficient finish normal work, Can only spare you spare time to do open source, and a lot of open source contributors to gain economic benefits from open source, of course, there really are in the process of “feelings” lovers of geeks don’t care about squeezing their time and effort and without economic return, at the very least they this input can be harvested in the open source community to “fame” connections can also enhance the capacity of technology, However, the desire of most people to contribute to development in the long run may backfire. So their pain point is “can not guarantee the maximum energy input, long-term free output has no economic return”, the demand is “fame and fortune”.
In my opinion, whether the two pain points in open source projects can be solved and whether the needs can be met is the core point that determines whether an open source project can develop healthily in the long run. Open source is a Toy if it doesn’t meet the needs of its users, and open source software can’t move forward if it doesn’t meet the needs of its contributors.
So how to meet the demand of both sides, I think it’s better commercialization “open source”, in fact, before I understanding is narrow for open source commercial, I think the simple and crude, commercialization is to make get commercial return behind open source business company, to make open source software go better, now I understand it is narrow and even errors. I now think of commercialization or payoff as paying off on both sides of open source software in a specialized way.
First in order to meet the needs of users, a professional business company behind open source software, the commercial companies can provide users with professional professional technical consultation “, “technical support”, “source code parsing”, “efficient Bug fixes”, “personalized custom development”, etc., let users after all. Of course, the user has to pay for professional services for the commercial company, which is understandable. Based on the past experience, the service fees are negligible when software works well.
Secondly, in order to meet the needs of contributors, there will be two solutions. The first solution is to “recruit” open source contributors to make more contributions to open source projects wholeheartedly, and the commercial companies will meet their “fame and fortune”, such as fame. Commercial companies can provide opportunities and platforms for contributors to express, share and present their views, which will make contributors known to more people and broaden their career scope. In addition, there is an unrestricted office culture, such as Remote, no clocking, etc., which may not always be the case in the future. In such a “fame and fortune” way, I can do the work I like, and I will have higher output and more active and secure open source projects. Second, even if there is a commercial company, some contributors may not join a commercial company for various reasons, so how to ensure their “fame and fortune”? Based on experience, I think, for example, the name is basically the same as the first one, except that commercial companies can get more contributors to participate in the publicity in order to promote open source projects and give better play to their commercial services. Contributors themselves can also take the initiative to speak for their “name”. Leigh, I currently recommend the following: Commercial companies should take the lead in “developer certification” and launch a single or combined mode of commercial “Marketplace” or “Appstore” or “crowdsourcing” or “subcontracting” based on the characteristics of open source projects. In other words, contributors can decide for themselves whether to monetize their output in addition to their own open source contributions. For example, Plugins, Apps, etc. should be provided to the user for free, or can be used only with a price tag. So if it goes well, I think “fame and fortune” is just around the corner.
It can be seen from the above that at present, professional commercial companies seem to be able to perfectly solve the pain points and demands of both sides in open source projects. However, let’s think about why a commercial company should be created to solve this problem. What other purposes or influences does this commercial company have in the long run? Do they have complete control of the open source software, for example? Is open source software at the helm? Or even make open source not open source and so on? I think one way to think about it is this. It is this kind of thinking that has led to the emergence of the “Open Source Foundation” between Open Source software and commercial companies. It does not necessarily mean that commercial companies came before Open Source foundations. The most basic attribute of the Open Source Foundation is “neutrality”. One of its functions is to make open source projects free from the control of a commercial company through legal means, so that users and contributors can participate in the project without worrying about the loss of their own interests. There are a lot of details about open source foundations here, but you can refer to other materials. I think it is not necessary to have open source foundations if some open source projects can solve the above problems for a long time.
Open source projects and open source culture can be moved forward by “users” + “participants (open source contributors, businesses, open source foundations)” + something like a “developer community committee.”