This blog post is an in-depth reflection and summary on open source and business by John O’Nolan, founder of Ghost.
I hope this translation will be helpful for students who want to engage in open source.
For a long time, the intersection between open source projects and commercial companies has fascinated me. In many ways, their philosophies are completely opposite and irreconcilable. One is a completely community-driven social product; the other is a completely competition-driven capital feast.
However, somehow, they come together to form an incredibly powerful and influential alliance.
Two models have formed in traditional thinking: commercial companies that support open source projects and open source projects that operate commercially.
GitHub, Twitter, and Stripe are all excellent examples in the field of large commercial companies that practice the first model. Their core focus is growth and revenue, but they have also achieved great success by sharing the components they use with the open source community.
Conversely, Docker, WordPress, and Ember.js are all excellent examples in the field of open source projects, which happen to have commercial companies behind them. Their main focus is to create free, open source software — generating revenue is secondary or separate.
Based on their respective organizational structures, their operating methods are very different, but they can all be roughly categorized into these two models.
What interests me is how their respective positions in these models reflect their different approaches to business and open source.
Commercial companies that support open source projects are business-driven. They use their R&D capabilities to first meet their own needs. They build products that they themselves need, then share them for free, sacrificing the source code. If a project is built for only one use case, it generally cannot create a large community or attract more maintainers.
Commercially operated open source projects are community-run. Their R&D capabilities first focus on a wide range of application scenarios, so the project spreads very widely. Then, a separate application scenario is segmented for commercialization. The sacrifice is that the commercialization they build is extremely complex. When the development team is committed to meeting many application scenarios, it becomes very difficult to focus and iterate on one application scenario.
Both models are basically very effective, but they are not without flaws. When a business-focused company sacrifices the transparency and integrity of open source projects, it often causes real friction in the open source community. However, when an open source-focused project focuses on creating a sustainable enterprise, the end result is often that the software slowly dies or is sold without warning.
Ghost is in a very interesting position because it cannot be fit into either of these two models. We are trying to create a brand new model.
We are a self-sustaining commercial company and also a non-profit organization, and the sole purpose of the company is to support our open source project. Since the two are interdependent, their fates are irreversibly tied together. In the examples above, the interests between commercial companies and open source projects are always in conflict, but in our model, they are parallel and not contradictory.
When we want to accomplish something, we do it purely for the benefit of the open source community, and we can go all out because there are no complaints from shareholders about investment commitments. When we want to do something purely for commercial interests, we can still go all out because all commercial profits will be returned to the open source project and help the development of the community.
Therefore, we are neither a commercial company that supports open source projects nor an open source project that operates commercially.
We are — an open source company.
Reprinted with permission: Developer Relations »
