John Mark Walker

Successful open source products must be able to charge a cost that is sufficient to pay for the defrayed upstream open source contributions (development costs) and the downstream productization costs (vendor costs). Stated another way, products can only charge a sufficient price if they create value that can only be captured by customers paying for them. That might sound harsh, but it's a reality for all products. There's a saying in product management: Pray to pay doesn't work. With that said, don't be too worried. There are ethical ways to capture value.

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In my previous article, I walked through scenarios to help you determine whether to open source your SaaS solution, and discussed the cost-benefit analysis that goes along with this decision. From an open source point of view, there's no point in just chucking code over the wall, slapping on an open source license, and calling it a day. You want to create an inviting community where people want to collaborate and spend time-even socialize!-with you. Chucking code over the wall accomplishes nothing, besides giving others insight into how you do things. Although that may be interesting and beneficial for them, you don't get much benefit unless you create the pathways of collaboration and communication that unlock a thriving community. Thus, you have an inherent interest in doing this The Right Way™.

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Should a SaaS provider open source its primary platform, and if so, what is the best way to do it? The decision to open source code requires a fair bit of planning if you want to do it right, especially when it comes to user support and documentation. In the case of SaaS, the required planning is different, although it shares some factors with any open source effort. In my series, How to Make Money from Open Source Platforms, I focused on software that exists solely to be deployed on a computer, whether on a local machine, in a data center, or in a cloud platform (yes, I know the last two are redundant).

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Today, if you’re building a new product or service, open source software is likely playing a role. But many entrepreneurs and product managers still struggle with how to build a successful business purely on open source. The big secret of a successful open source business is that “it’s about way more than the code,” says John Mark Walker, a well-known voice in the open source world with extensive expertise in open source product, community, and ecosystem creation at Red Hat and Dell EMC.  “In order to build a certified, predictable, manageable product that ‘just works,’ it requires a lot more effort than just writing good code.”...

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