Keisuke Suzuki

Business Models using Open Source

By reading blog post Musings on Open Source Software Bossiness Model, I learned several bossiness models using or creating free and open source.

Subscription Offerings

The author categories the model as Subscription Offerings which everything the company produces is open source. Companies with this model often sell annual subscriptions which provide full support, updates, and access to all current binary releases of the software. One thing to note here is all source code is open, so customers don't pay for any license to use the software.

Donation Models

Companies with this model solicit donations for downloads of their products, but they do not require the user to do it. This model sounds more familiar since I use Elementary OS for my daily and educational use, and I donate for some of their apps that I find useful. He lists Mozzila as one of the companies that use this bossiness model

Open Core

Companies that use this model provide their core product as open source, but they also offer "commercial" versions or add-ons as proprietary software. He mentions Pivotal as the best example of this model. Open core companies often have Software As Services (SaaS), which offer open source software service running on their infrastructure.

In the very beginning of the semester, Prof. Weiss told us that RedHat has the highest revenue in companies whose products consists only from open source, and I remember wondering how they achieve that. Although the subscription Offering model still sounds wired to me, it is proven by RedHat(IBM) being the top organization for enterprise open source operating systems. When I read the section about Open Core, the first company came up to my mind was Amazon Web Service, but there seem to be some arguments whether it can be categorized as Open Core as well as MongoDB and Redis (see this post for more details). Also, I remember in the talk by Vicky Brasseur, which I wrote a brief response on this post, she mentioned that GPL can be a great license that works well in combination with proprietary licenses, and I found that Oracle MySQL is a great open core example for this combination.

Do I want to work for a company only produced open source software?

Taking this course, I started seeing blurred picture of the concept behind it. The more I learn about open source, I am more convinced by the idea of it. I have become especially attracted the fact that the concept of open source represents the core idea of programming. One example is the famous Three Virtues, by Larry Wall, who is the creator of Perl, which I think is one of the most important aspects of open source development. Having said that, yes, even though I would love to work for a company that only produced open source software, I do not care how purely open sourced the company is, and I would be more considered how it respects the concept of open source. However, because of the situation now, the industry’s aspect of the buyer’s market has become even worse, so I wouldn’t be able to choose what I want to do also as an international student who needs sponsorship to stay in this country.

Open Source Solution for Election Fraud

In response to the post Election fraud: Is there an open source solution?, I learned that there is an institution called Open Source Election Technology (OSET) that is developing open source technology for elections in the United States. The author mainly discusses the current election system runs on a legacy system in terms of both software and hardware. It sounds good to me to switch the legacy software running something like Windows7 whose support will end in 2022. Besides, it is generally safer if the software is open and strictly maintained. However, the author points out that there are several things to be done by the next election, so I hope it will be successful shortly.

Inkscape

I made a pull request for inkscape-ci-docker a couple of weeks ago, and I am glad that I found it to have been merged.

For our team, we’ve been working on this issue, and since we have been struggling to build the inkscape-web project in our local machine, and it seems working only on Linux platforms, so we decided to work on discord to modify files on my machine. This week we finally made a merge request with slight modification in some of the css files. It just got merged next day. Thanks for their quick and kind response. We are also working on this issue about some elements in the search result having incorrect HTML rendering. We came up with two possible causes:

1. Some formatting mistake in one of the HTML template files
   • Django uses the template system that allows generating dynamic and static HTML in a .html file using Django Template Language. We haven’t found which file is causing this, and Mathew asked about it in the issue page.
2. The resource in the database has incorrect formats
   • The database resources which contains the text could have incorrect forms. However, we cannot investigate if it is true since we don’t have access to the database. Mathew made a comment asking it as well.