Open sourcing as a business strategy
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Analyzing the goals of open source projects
It is necessary to reconsider how much of this new platform your company has implemented in its own products.
You need to ask yourself whether owning such a platform really benefits your company's interests.
How much does your company's overall product and service revenue depend on that platform?
Moving on to a specific example, let's assume you run a database-related company.
The breakdown of revenue is as follows:
40% database software sales
15% support services
10% consulting services
10% application rapid development tools
10% graphical management tools
10% user-available libraries
15% manual sales/training
In this situation, if you distribute "database software" for free (OSS), you will lose 40% of your revenue w. However...
First of all, a database is not the kind of application that you buy from a major computer retail chain like CompUSA, install on your machine, and be done with it. Support is also required. Consultation is also required. In other words, customers need the various services your company provides. In fact, by making previously expensive database software free, you can now charge higher prices for other related services.
At first, it's not valuable to people who can't use them "only in the OSS part."
Most people can't use them only in the OSS part.
Therefore, even with rough calculations, making the database free or cheaper doubles the adoption base, and if customers show the same interest in consulting, support, development tools, libraries, etc. as before, total revenue will increase by 20%.