The little guy vs The Man

Matt Asay blogs that open source started small but is increasingly a play ground for the big companies. He goes on to write that small companies often connect with existing larger communities in order to reach scale while the big companies are able to kickstart a new community up to scale.

Both are true but the reasons or the results are perhaps a bit different than what Matt describes. One specific area where I believe there’s more to the story is when Matt writes that large-scale enterprises don’t need to worry about selling value (through their open source projects) because they already have profitable product lines that complement the open source efforts.

From my own professional experience I can say that this is often not the case.

The specific challenge that large companies have contrary to the small ones is exactly that: making sure that the open source efforts and the profitable product lines are indeed complementary. Many of the big companies start a particular open source project well after they launched their proprietary software products. In many cases big companies get into a particular open source project not because how it may complement existing offerings but through other means (it came with an acquisition for example) or for other strategic reasons.

Often the open source project will operate in a market similar to or very close to those that the existing products are addressing. Internal competition (for market share, for engineering resources, for marketing resources and so on) is inevitable if there is not a clear differentiating positioning of one vs the other. This battle is more likely to be damaging to the open source project and to the community it lives in. In these internal battles the proprietary products often have the upper hand as they bring in measurable revenue while for the open source project the contribution to the bottom line is often much more indirect.