2005-12-10
Communities and open source
In Matt Asay's blog he mentions how he shared a flight with Clint Oram of SugarCRM, where clint quotes..
Of the top 50 contributors to SugarCRM's development community, 95% of them are SugarCRM partnersAnd goes on to say that this is a good thing. Well.. count me in the ignorant pile, because I'm not so sure. For me the signs of a vibrant community is more that the *USERS* of the product are contributing patches back to it, not the people getting paid to install it. This might be because we have a different definition of what a community is, or maybe the client base of sugarcrm aren't technically sophisiticated enough to contribute back to it.. why is this important? Well there are two major benefits I've heard that a 'open source' product has. The improved sales:revenue ratio, with JBoss's Marc Fluery saying recently :
An optimally functioning FOSS business model needs 20 cents of sales and marketing to acquire 1 dollar of maintenance, where a traditional software company will have to spend around 2 1/2 dollars.and a decreased R&D:sales ratio (can't find a quote..sorry). SugarCRM needs to find a way to get it's users to contribute back into the development. only then will it get the full benefit of being a open source company. There are 2 other important reasons why you want the users to contribute back as well. Product Innovation, and ownership. the Users are the ones who know what their business needs, not the 'partners' who install it, they don't use the product day in and day out. The second reason is ownership, if you have put your own sweat and tears into making something work, it will be much harder to give it up for some other product later on. If you can get your users to feel that they play a bigger part than the person signing the check they won't leave as easily. of course.. this is all a moot point if they call their 'users' 'partners' isn't it ;-)