Commercial Open Source in Europe Versus the US

We just finished the first Europe Open Source Think Tank (OSTT). Andrew Aitken of Olliance and Alexandre Zapolsky of Linagora hosted a fantastic event. I highly recommend it to anyone who can attend.

During the course of the two days a common theme I heard repeatedly was the difference between commercial Open Source businesses in Europe versus in the US. The differences are best illustrated by examining different views on a number of concepts. This isn’t a scientific survey, but reflects opinions I heard consistently from multiple people over the two days of the conference:

Concept/Idea	European View	United States View
Primary reason for adopting Open Source.	Avoid vendor lock-in.	Cost.
Key driver of commercial Open Source business creation.	Creation of a local software industry.	Venture capital/entrepreneur driven to create a big business and make money for investors.
Dual licensing business models.	Not true open source. Proprietary business models using Open Source for PR and marketing.	Widely accepted as the most common Open Source business model.
Software sales model.	Channel oriented: VARs and SIs.	Direct.
Open Source business models.	Service and support subscription focused; 100% open source software.	US companies don’t want to be in the services business. The focus is on products, typically proprietary add-ons or an Enterprise Edition paired with an Open Source product edition.
Expectations around "Open Source" products.	All code is available under Open Source. There is often a community governance of community participation model.	Same, but not necessarily all products are available under an Open Source license. Commercially licensed versions of the products are commonly available. Projects are managed by a commercial vendor.

Let’s explore each of these in a bit more detail.

Primary reason for adopting Open Source.

The week prior to the OSTT I spent a few days with senior IT people from the financial services industry in New York. The last two OSTTs in Napa both featured CIO panels. In all three cases I heard a common theme that the primary driving factor for their adoption of Open Source was cost. Likewise The451 Group did a survey of CIOs regarding Open Source adoption and identified cost as their primary reason for selecting an Open Source alternative. That’s in stark contrast to what I heard this week at the Europe OSTT. Cost is still important, but the Open Source nature of the software is more important; specifically, the ability to have multiple vendors (avoiding vendor lock-in) and the ability to influence and support the direction of the project.

Key driver of commercial Open Source business creation.

I’m somewhat biased living in Silicon Valley at the center of the information technology Venture Capital business, but in the US we are definitely driven to create Open Source businesses with venture capital. The US has a large and successful existing proprietary software business. Our motivation in the US is to build the next generation of software companies. But in Europe that’s not the case. Here there is a natural desire to build a local software economy and Open Source offers that opportunity. That’s a major motivating factor in the adoption of Open Source.

Dual licensing business models.

Business models based on dual licensing (either relicensing Open Source code under a commercial license or selling a commercial version of an Open Source project with added features) have become commonplace in the US. I definitely heard from the European attendees at the OSTT that there’s a negative reaction among European customers to those models. This contrasts with the US CIOs I talked with last week who were definitely more comfortable with getting their Open Source software from a vendor with a commercial license.

Software sales model.

Commercial Open Source in the US has relied heavily on an ability to disintermediate the software selling process and go direct to the buyers. Interestingly enough that doesn’t appear to have happened in Europe. Here the buyers still seem to acquire software predominantly through VARs and SIs. The direct model does not seem to be as widely accepted here. Perhaps it’s because the VARs and SIs in Europe are more heavily invested in Open Source than they are in the US.

Open Source business models.

Support and service subscription models clearly dominated the thinking among the Europeans here at OSTT. This contrasts with our thinking in the US that services models are not scalable and that the models should be product based.

Expectations around "Open Source" products.

The bar for Open Source companies is clearly higher in Europe than in the US. That is, expectations are that if a company is primarily an Open Source vendor that 100% of their software is available under an Open Source license. Further, that there is some community model or interaction model that allows a customer to participate in guiding the direction of the software.

Conclusions.

I’ve said this many times: Europe and most of the rest of the world is ahead of the US in Open Source adoption. This has been the case since I started tracking Linux usage numbers by country in the mid to late 90s. I believe the attitude differences I observed at this OSTT reflect a more sophisticated view of Open Source than we have today in the US. In the US the Open Source nature of the software is almost irrelevant to a company’s buying decision. The US buyers want better, cheaper software and a better relationship with vendors; all of which Open Source helps create for them. But they are not so interested in the source code itself nor in how access to the code created those benefits.

I believe the European Open Source software community has moved beyond that. The European community sees those benefits, but in addition recognizes that the Open Source nature of the code is the driving factor behind those benefits. As a result they have embraced Open Source to a degree the US market has not; insisting in many cases on acquiring the software under an open source license, not an alternative commercial license. It’s great to see this level of sophistication among the commercial Open Source community in Europe, and I have hope that eventually the US market will catch up.

Comments

[Mike Linksvayer]

Re Dual licensing business models.

Aren't MySQL and Trolltech the canonical examples of this model? They're both European (or MySQL was until recent acquisition by Sun).

All in all quite interesting contrast.

[Bruce Benson]

Hey Larry thanks for the take away notes. I wonder if the USA adoption reason of 'cost' as the primary reason is due a CIO methodology where many things can be inferred to have cost. Lock-in, source control, and a lot of other good reasons look good when the business case is assembled and a cost model is presented upstream for the adoption approval. Then it's "cost of vendor lock-in", "cost of technology control", "cost of..."

[Nomen Nescio]

Part of the European attitude to US Open Source offerings where there is a commercial or 'enterprise' edition offered by the same organisation as well, is to feel somewhat put out, as the suspicion is that Open Source offering is 'crippleware', designed to get you hooked into the product, ready to be milked by having to pay for the 'enterprise' version at a later stage.

The 'services' model implies you get full functionality immediately, and the vendor makes money on hand-holding. One benefit of the services model is that ongoing support is an operational cost, and no capital is involved in the initial procurement. In accounting terms, that is very useful.

Simplicio

[Michael B.]

From a software engineer's point of view, the US business model of a more product-centric (vs. service-centric) approach is more attractive, as it is more fun.
I also agree with the scaling argument, startup stock options may make you rich if you are lucky and the product turns out to be a success, that probably won't happen in the service world where you have to actually do client work for every dollar you earn. ;)

Btw., I am european, so I guess the grass is always greener on the other side.

[Penguin Pete]

Thank you for the great research and analysis! This coincides with much that I have observed in dealings with clients in the US and UK.

One factor I think that affects these attitudes, is that UK members are more interested in self-sufficiency and small business. In the US, it's like the attitude is "I don't know about this computer stuff, that's what we have billion-dollar corporations for. Let them worry about it and I'll just stay in this pasture and eat this grass."

[Alan]

"On the fact that most software is written on one side of the Atlantic Ocean" --Alan Kay

[jim_who]

"This contrasts with the US CIOs I talked with last week who were definitely more comfortable with getting their Open Source software from a vendor with a commercial license."

WTF? How stupid can Americans be? Get your _open source_ from a _vendor_ with a _commercial license_ ? Wot ?!

Why don't just buy a product that let's you have source code? Have these people been around the last 20 years?!

They clearly don't get it, do they? Not only that, they are been sold an aold model with a new wrapping...

[Redhuan D. Oon]

This is ne of the most interesting blogs 1 can come across on the subjective nature of Commercial OSS vs Community OSS. It provides a simple yardstick to rein in the opposing thoughts on a single chart. Bravo Larry!

red1
founding peer of,
The ADempiere Bazaar (Euro version)
A Compiere Fork (US version)
:-)

[Michael Towne]

Good observation! I think one of the factors that contribute to this is that there are more corporate-sponsored IP (aka copyright) policies and enforcements in the U.S. that eats away at the motivation of many to invest their time in Open Source. Few of monopolizing US software companies work against an atmosphere of mutually beneficial endeavors found in the rest of the world. And the population in the U.S. has been "tamed" to be mostly non-programmers. You could easily correlate the gradual enhancement of OS to the decreasing number of people interested in programming in the U.S. And also, the sense of ownership in the U.S. may have made more in the U.S. to be somewhat complacent.

[Patrick Finch]

Very interesting.

I think that dual licensing may be perceived differently between B2B and B2C. I have never heard anyone complain about the fact that Java is dual-licensed, for example, on either side of the pond.

@jim_who: open source under a commercial license can make a great deal of sense if you wish to extend the product but do not wish to open your own code. This is not a position I would generally advocate, but it is apparently appealing to some.

[Don Marti]

How much of the difference is because of company founders' previous industry experience? Does the US open source industry have more managers with proprietary software experience, and the European industry have more people with services or consulting backgrounds?

[Franck V.]

This is a well known difference between Europe and US.

But there are some precisions to be made :
1) some US players are moving to European way of OpenSource : Pentaho Inc. is one of them. Pentaho BI Suite 2.0 will be GPL.
2) Commercial Licencing means usually service agreement. MySQL Commercial licencing is a service agreement and access to some proprietary tools. MySQL DB engine included in Commercial Licence is the GPL one, no special functions are added.
3) precision 2) is true only for GPL products.

[Martin Schoch]

About cost vs. avoiding vendor lock-in:

As a European who worked for a subsidiary of a US company in the last four years, I have the impression that this reflects a more general difference in corporate policy:

My current, US owned employer seems to be most interested in short-term profit, sometimes at the expense of preparing for medium to long term challenges (anything that takes more than 2 years to yield a result). In this context "we pay less license fees now".

European companies seem more willing to look at long term consequences and accept short term disadvantages to avoid long term headaches. As in "retraining cost will eat up the price advantage now, but we will be safe from future price hikes and product discontinuation".

[Justin Brooks]

I would be interested to know whether the attitude in other regions such as South America are in line with the European view. If so this would particularly bolster the 'local software industry' argument underlining the desire not to be beholden to the US proprietary software giants.

[Randal L. Schwartz]

"Get your _open source_ from a _vendor_ with a _commercial license_ ? "

Yes, it's the "who do you sue/blame when it goes bad?" mentality. The US "management" style is all about short-term risk management, sacrificing long-term growth if needed.

Some of my Perl customers are wary of downloading anything from the CPAN, simply because they wouldn't know who to sue if it broke something. So they reimplement the very same thing from scratch! It doesn't even help when I tell them "but but... you can vet every line of code... it's all open source!" Wild.

[ckeene]

The biggest single factor to explain these differences is the attitude towards Microsoft. In the US, where Microsoft is seen as a successful, if aggressive, competitor, adoption open source is a business decision, that is to say based on ROI.

In the US, where Microsoft is seen as a malignant force, adoption of open source is seen as a political decision, that is to say based on and ideology that trumps business considerations.

Viewed this way, the differences you describe are very consistent, particularly if you just insert the word Microsoft at strategic points.

For example, on the first observation, the primary reason for adopting open source in Europe is to avoid [Microsoft] lock-in; while the primary reason in the US is cost, as Microsoft lock-in per se is not seen as a bad thing.

[Pierre Baudracco]

Good article, and I was at the eOSTT (hello Larry !), but I think one important point is missing. This is the european view for public sector only !
The private sector in europe has nearly the same behaviour as what you describe here as the United states view. (At least this is what I see dealing with our obm product, public vs private behaviour)

This can be explained by the maturity of some administration members but also by the fact that not going Open Source means going to proprietary and so sending great deal of money to the US with no economic value localy. And Open Source means technology independance.