rebelutionary / 2.0

Commercial Open Source License Donations / 2007 Mar 09

Grant recently asked why commercial companies give away licenses to Open Source projects. I find among Open Source developers there is sometimes a 'fear' around this area, so I thought I'd try to explain things from my perspective. (Obviously I can't speak for every company out there).

As one of the founders of Atlassian and the guy who came up with the crazy idea (It was probably something along the lines of "I hate that ridiculously crap SourceForge tracker app, why don't we just give a JIRA license to OpenSymphony for free?") in the first place, I feel I have something to answer for here. I believe we were the first company to do it freely and publically - you've been able to get JIRA for any Open Source project for more than 5 years now, since day 1. It has been on our licensing and pricing as long as we've had one.

Why did we do it back then?

The largest reason was mostly to contribute what we can to the community, and to a lesser extent so we didn't have to use some other horrible tracking system when writing Open Source code. We use a huge number of Open Source components (over 100 OSS dependencies at last count), we have committers on a huge range of projects (from Apache to OpenSymphony to CodeHaus and more) and it was another way for us to give back to the community.

Does it help sales? We've never been able to reliably track that, but I've heard of (directly) a few sales that have come from people using JIRA on say Spring, then suggesting it to their boss when they were looking for an issue tracker a year later. For every person I've heard from, there's probably 10 more I haven't - so it definitely doesn't hurt there.

Does it help the software? Definitely. Open Source developers are far more likely to file bugs, speak up when they feel things are crap etc. This helps the product improve markedly (as long as you follow through on those suggestions).

As for tax breaks, I'm not sure about the US but in Australia you can't get a tax break by giving away software - it has no physical cost. I'd imagine it's the same in most countries.

Giving away a software license doesn't cost anything. Supporting it does. We provide full support to Open Source licensees, just like any commercial customer. For quite a few of our licenses, we also buy servers and host them. We'd spend tens of thousands a year on server hardware and hosting for various Open Source instances, not to mention the support time (which is likely much larger in actual cost) - so there is a physical cost to your company.

(I must give a shout out to the world's best hosting company Contegix who are always very generous with Open Source projects. I can't say enough good things about them)

The one thing that never gets mentioned is boost it gives your company in hiring. To me, this is the biggest advantage we get from the whole program. We've hired quite a few very talented engineers because they've seen how we treat and give back to the community.

As a product/engineering company, good enginers are like gold dust - so to me this is our biggest win in terms of direct cost savings. Consider a $20k recruitment fee for a good engineer, if we get two developers a year from our Open Source license donations and hosting - we come out way ahead. Hopefully so does the project that gets to use our great software for free to build their own.

Comments

Post a comment

Name:


Email Address:


URL:

Captcha:

Type the characters you see in the picture above.

Remember personal info?
YesNo
Comments: