<
https://www.zdnet.com/article/dumping-open-source-for-proprietary-rarely-pays-off-better-to-stick-a-fork-in-it/>
'LONDON — Over the past decade, companies such as Redis, Elastic, MongoDB, and
HashiCorp have abandoned their open-source license roots and switched to
proprietary models. The companies cite competition from cloud providers and
investor pressure, but the decision is all about making more money. However,
there's a fly in this soup: The strategy doesn't work.
At the UK's State of Open conference, Dawn Foster, director of data science for
the CHAOSS Project, unveiled compelling evidence that forks — community-driven
alternatives to proprietary codebases — are thriving. At the same time,
companies that abandoned open-source principles face stagnant growth and
disillusioned users.
The business theory behind going proprietary sounds good. You dump your
open-source licenses (for example, Apache 2.0 or AGPL) that got you your start
and replace them with restrictive licenses, such as the Server Side Public
License (SSPL) or Business Source License (BSL), to more easily monetize your
code.
However, the bad news for many companies is the financial payoff has never
materialized. RedMonk, the developer analysis firm, published a study by senior
analyst Rachel Stevens that found "no clear link between license changes and
increased company value." While revenue grew after the fact, growth rates
mirrored pre-change trends.
At the event in London, James Governor, RedMonk's co-founder, said: "There is
neither a share price rise for public companies nor revenue gains. There's no
clear, 'Oh, we relicensed and got a hockey stick.' So, I think that if
businesses are making these decisions, the expectation is that relicensing will
be the special source that takes it to the next level. The numbers do not
indicate that."'
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
