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Integration Watch: From open source to commercial quality: A study in rigor

By Andrew Binstock

October 15, 2009 — (Page 1 of 3)
For the last year, our company has been working with a client that is moving from a purely open-source model to a commercial product. The OSS product is already widely used, so the first year has consisted of setting up the corporate entity, creating the support infrastructure, and building a sales team while closing deals with users who were eager to get a commercial license and/or priority tech support. Next year, working from an established base of customers will see a stronger push for sales at sites not familiar with the product.

The model is slightly unusual: a self-funded OSS company is a rara avis. As a result, there are no case studies to build on, and much of the details of this particular model have to be learned on the run.

One particularly interesting set of changes occurs in product development and management as the transition from OSS to commercial quality is undertaken. Some readers, especially OSS diehards, will view this as a false dichotomy. Nothing in the OSS model should imply software of less than commercial quality. At least, not in theory.

This particular project consists of roughly half a million lines of code that were written primarily to solve a specific set of problems. The developers had certain business needs, wrote a solution, and shared it as OSS. They also wrote more than 600 pages of documentation. However, they did not design the product to compete with commercial offerings. Over the years, other contributors added pieces here and there to solve other specific problems: generally, just enough code to obtain a specific feature.

As a result, one of the first things we’ve done with the product is to decide what features to remove. What features are partially implemented with no likelihood of completion? What features add nothing to the value proposition of the product? What features that are not central are more trouble than they’re worth? All of these features are being removed and put into a separate OSS resource pool that users can adopt, while keeping those bits out of the commercial offering.

Related Search Term(s): open source

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