24.1 The business of open source  (Page 2/2)

Many companies sell software solutions under a commercial license where their customers get access to the source code for analyzing performance issues using their own profiling tools. For any organization that has their own technology team capable of compiling the application from source and inserting monitoring hooks, this can be a nice compromise where infrastructure risks can be managed internally but with the safety of external support should things go wrong.

It comes down to decomposition and transparency. The winners will be the ones that understand the market will reward companies offering choice of platform, services, support and leadership - none of which are dependent on each other.

Again, I love forcing people to innovate through disruption. If the game is not working for you then simply change the rules of the game.

Comments

1. ken udas -april 11th, 2008 at 1:18 pm

Stuart, First, thank you very much for this direct posting on such a relevant topic. It provides a lot of hooks to talk about. I have two questions to start out with:

You are a leader at MoodleRooms, can you tell me a little about the MoodleRooms model, which it value add is, and what types or organizations can benefit from the business/service model that you are using?

and

Are there qualities to Moodle that make it a good open source application to support your model? That is, what are the qualities of OSS applications that make then better for the “Business of Open Source?”

We can start here, and expand out a bit more later. Ken

2. stuart sim - april 17th, 2008 at 8:19 pm

Hi Ken, The Moodlerooms model is simply to offer the best hosted platform for Moodle services on the planet. Moodle already has a strong functional and pedagogic focus and our mission is to complement that success with the introduction of world class enterprise qualities.

We aim to disrupt the market by sharing the design of the hosting platform with our partners and competitors and therefore forcing better service from all the service providers.

Cheers, Stuart

3. stuart sim - april 18th, 2008 at 12:27 pm

The openness and active collaboration of the Moodle community highlight the best properties of an open source project needed for anyone to develop competitive services in support of the code.

The community is also very welcoming of experiences shared by commercial service providers from the field and supports healthy discussion on the issues related to operating and supporting the code base.

4. ken udas - april 22nd, 2008 at 5:39 pm

Stuart, I see what you are doing from the Moodlerooms perspective, but what do you think that larger impact services like Moodlerooms is having on higher education and the use or acceptance of open source applications in the LMS space?

Thanks, Ken

5. steve foerster - april 23rd, 2008 at 11:19 am

Hi Stuart, thanks for your interesting post. How do you compare the services that you and other open source providers offer with those from closed source competitors? For example, my university uses Blackboard, which offers integration with student records systems like Datatel.

6. kim tucker - may 20th, 2008 at 7:30 am

In Africa and other parts of the “developing” world some have recognised the importance of free/libre and open source software in terms of cost and (more importantly) empowerment - i.e. rather than being passive consumers of highly restrictive software, being able to adapt and develop the software further and offer services to make a living (e.g. distribution, training, support, configuration and customisation, software development, etc.).

There is a project starting up which may be of interest to readers, and we invite participation: (External Link)

I have started by including a link to this blog posting on one of the Curriculum pages.

Thanks! :-)