Do Enterprises care whether it is really Open Source?
There’s a pretty stable definition out there what Open Source software is all about and what license models should allow for and what not. Despite of that Enterprises seem not to care too much about this.
For many enterprise using Open Source support and services are more important than the true nature of software, it seems. Often the prefer the commercially licensed product with the attached subscriptions to be on the safe side. But this can mean that the software they use isn’t Open Source at all and that changes and modifications they do might not even belong them.
A lot of Open Source software today is consumed as Software as a Services (SaaS). In this case nobody cares whether the software that is the basis of the application is Open Source or not. And this makes sense, because in this case a service is purchased not a software.
Many customers also buy appliances instead of software and hardware separately. Again, nobody needs to worry about what’s in the box, it’s purchased as an integral product.
And, when Enterprises buy commercial software products, a lot of it today is assembled from Open Source components. But there is no need to care about this as what companies buy is the packaged software.
So, four cases, but only in one of them the nature of the software is critical. There hasn’t been enough push back from Enterprises to force commercial open source companies to come up with Open Source compliant commercial license models. Some of the problems can be resolved in individual negotiations, but that’s cumbersome. So, what would be preferrable are license models that allow the commercial software company to make money while protecting as much of the Open Source nature of the base software. Let’s see what new models we’ll see over the next months and years.
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