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Don’t Be Afraid of Free

Matt Asay
Global Vice President, Business Development
Alfresco
Free: Scary or not?

Free is scary if… Free is appealing if…


 You insist on an  Your goal is to
outdated business encourage adoption
model and developer
 Your core is someone communities
else’s complement  You’d like to
 You charge a premium undermine a high-
for value others give
away for free price competitor
Scary if your model is license fees
Open source growth
Whether measured in terms of lines of code added or new projects,
open-source growth is phenomenal

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Broad adoption of open source

63
OperatingSystems 34
85
54
ApplicationsSoftware 53
73
75
InfrastructureSoftware 58
90
15
None 27
2

0 20 40 60 80 100
Percentageof Respondents
CurrentlyUsinginThis Budget Year PlantoUseinNext Budget Year CurrentlyUsingandPlantoUseinNext Budget Year

Source: Gartner 2008


Number of respondents = 274; Multiple responses allowed.

~100% to adopt open-source by 2010


Not just about infrastructure anymore…

Source: Forrester, 2009


What about mobile? Pigs start flying…
Why? Because it saves $...and more

87%

92%

86%

82%
84%

91%
82%

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Better quality, more innovation at a lower price

 “Open source software solutions “Open source produces better software.”


will directly compete with closed-
source products in all …markets.”
 85% of enterprises currently use
OSS (the other 15% are lying)
 45% use OSS for mission-critical
applications (Continues to grow)

 Why?
 65% say open source has
sparked innovation inside their
companies
 67% … for lowered costs
 “Lower TCO and flexibility to
launch and develop cost-
prohibitive projects continue to be
top reasons for using OSS”
 81% … for better quality software

Sources: Gartner (2008), CIO Insight (2006), IDC (2006)


Open source increasingly handles
mission-critical workloads

Open source is becoming the heart of mobile and enterprise computing


The open-source model lowers risk
 Most IT projects fail
 Open source de-risks software
acquisition:
 Try before you buy
 Stop your subscription if the
vendor stops providing value
 Dramatically lower cost
 Worst case:
 Project dies and you’re out
$xx,xxx or $xxx,xxx, not
$x,xxx,xxx
 Project failure becomes less
probabilistic and less painful
 You, not the vendor, are in
control

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Should Symbian worry?

 ~50% smartphone market share in 2009*


 223M open-source handsets by 2014…
 …180M of those will be Symbian (Juniper Research, 2009)
 Tens of thousands of applications,
developers
Two options, one that Symbian made

Soup-to-Nuts Just Soup. Or Nuts


 Apple offers a fully  Horizontal play has
integrated experience worked well…for
Microsoft
 Can Symbian be the
benevolent mobile
platform?
 Google Android gaining
ground fast
 Symbian can win, but
must get developers
 Apple also winning
over developers
Symbian has a great base, but…

 Symbian already has 10,000+ applications


 But users need to be able to find them
 Symbian already has thousands of developers
 But this developer base must be energized and focused
 Symbian already has dominant market share
 But it is losing the PR war and new developer interest
 Mobile market now being shaped in the US, where
Symbian has limited PR awareness)
Community won't do it alone
● <15 core developers do 85-100% of core
development work
● 1000/10/1 (Users/ Bug Reporters/ Patch
Submitters)
The Shape of
● Community is difficult to achieve: Community
● 72% of “open source developers” write
code for others like themselves
● Most projects (55%) get no outside
involvement at all
● BUT…even big community projects are
written by vendors
•Up to 95% of Linux development sponsored by
companies

● Most community involvement is in


complements to a project, not the core

Sources: Marten Mickos (MySQLUC 2005); O’Mahony & West, 2005; Mockus et al., 2005
Reality? Vendors make community work

• Time
– Who has time to write (lots of)
free software?
– Answer: Those that are
employed to do so

• Interest
– Who will take out the trash?

• Aptitude
– The higher up the stack you go,
the fewer the developers

• Familiarity with project


– Poor documentation makes it
hard to understand a project
– Monolithic code base takes time
to learn (Most won’t bother)
How ‘free’ can help Symbian

 Symbian needs new developers (apps) and licensees


(reach)
 Low to no-cost for development (like Palm)
 Neutral promoter of applications to help developers get paid
 Centralize app discovery to help licensees see value in the
platform
 Symbian is a foundation (Mozilla, Eclipse), which gives it
latitude commercial competitors don’t have
 Be like Mozilla – make plenty of money, but make it in
partner/customer-friendly ways
 Carry the burden of core development, freeing the community
ecosystem to create winning complements
How non-’free’ can help ecosystem

 Several winning business models


 Open Core model (Open core, closed complements)
 IBM model (Open-source loss leaders)
 Red Hat model (Open software, closed services)
 Microsoft model (Closed core, open complement)
 The more you invest in Symbian, the greater the
returns
 Hard to monetize if you don’t contribute (Source of code
instead of source code)
 “The Community” will never do work *for* you – only
*with* you
 Spit and polish is always a commercial endeavor
email | mjasay@gmail.com

twitter | twitter.com/mjasay

blog | cnet.com/openroad

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