My ongoing dialogue with Matthew Aslett inspired me to read more of his recent writings. An excellent piece Do not sell anything to your community is based on a blog post by Stephen Walli.

Inspired by Stephen, I also looked into a set of slides I recently created and will try that style for this post...

Aslett and Stephen make a great point:

the conversion of community users into paying customers has long been a concern for open source-related vendors. It has also long been a source of friction, with vendors that offer proprietary extensions being accused of “bait and switch” or otherwise undermining the value of the open source software in an attempt compel community users into becoming paying customers. In recent years the next generation of start-ups has learned that the best way to encourage a frictionless relationship between a vendor and its community is not to attempt to “convert” users at all.

Oh my. I was outside painting my house for a few days, and when I return back online I discover that now everyone is having an opinion on the open core business model. Since some participants are still trying to promote it as a valid open source business model, let's see what everyone is saying and highlight any pitfalls being offered...

Julie Bort of Networkworld.com has an interview with Mårten Mickos of Eucalyptus, formerly of MySQL. In MySQL times it seemed (to me at least) that most users never realized Mårten and his management team were taking MySQL increasingly into a closed source direction. (Maybe I'm just stupid myself, but at least personally I had not noticed this until after I started working for the company.) In this interview Mårten at least comes squarely out of the closet and is defending the model.

Julie makes a good journalistic effort of reporting on the topic from a neutral point of view. Alas, sometimes that approach just makes things fuzzier. So let me try to make one thing clear: Open core may be a good business model, but open core is not open source!

I may or may not be interviewed on the Swedish language Radio Vega. The background to this confusing statement is that the Finnish government today publishes a report on the use of open source in Finnish companies and associated risks related to that. I was a contributor to the report since Monty Program is a Finnish open source company. I guess since I speak Swedish, the reporter had scheduled a telephone interview with me after the press conference.

I just want to jot down a few comments here about an open-ed piece by Glyn Moody at the H-online: Why Making Money from Free Software Matters. It is a very good summary of the motivations I had in writing my book Open Life: The Philosophy of Open Source and why I have since also strived to work towards making businesses benefit from Open Source models, and vice versa, making Open Source benefit from the businesses.

Says Glyn:

Google Summer of Code is now open for student applications and people (like Ronald Bradford) are noticing that MySQL is not participating this year. (Drizzle otoh is a mentoring organization.)

Last week I finally uploaded to Drupal.org the Vineyard theme - ie the theme I created and use for openlife.cc. Releasing the theme as open source is something I always planned of doing, but never really got round to it. I'm especially proud of the fact the theme looks different than most Drupal themes I've seen, so I hope others can use this as a basis for creating nice sites.

Well, for Matt Asay, I should start by congratulating you for the new job and nice title! (Also, we learn some intelligence from Matt's blog: apparently Canonical is already close to the size of MySQL AB at the time of the Sun acquisition.)

Usually we are told to "ignore the trolls" and all that. The blogosphere unfortunately seems to be full of commentators who like to have share their opinion - even while they are entirely clueless. Sometimes, like the comments on Slashdot, it is ok and considered part of the entertainment. Sometimes it is harmless, because nobody reads that blog. And sometimes, it is just unacceptable:

Last week Red Hat announced what seems to be a significant effort to bring open source thinking into non-technical areas of life and society. This was very interesting to me, as it is a topic I have also put much thought to in my book. While the welcome announcement is dated last week, it seems the sight has been pre-seeded with posts from different Red Hat employees so that it already looks like an active community site.

One post I stumbled upon is written by Red Hat's Pam Chestek, titled Letting Go:

It seems last week was a popular weekend for programming hobby projects, as it wasn't only me who was having fun with some recreative programming. Yesterday I published a new version of my Footnotes module for Drupal.