Use open source to grow your company

I am an economist specialising in public policy and technology. I have observed that open source results in faster innovation and better product quality. Using my knowledge, experience, and research abilities, I can help you:

Profitably open source your product

There is a widespread perception that open source can’t be profitable. Even people who are actively involved in developing open source software or hardware frame the issue as “open source vs commercial”. Open source is seen as a loss leader or a way of giving back to the community rather than something that can be profitable in and of itself. This is clearly not true.

There are plenty of open source companies, big and small, that are thriving. SUSE, for instance, sells enterprise Linux to companies worldwide. Collabora is another company that has been profitably building open source software for the past twenty years. And of course there is RedHat, which was acquired by IBM in 2019 for $34 billion.

Whether you are looking to open source an existing product, or building something from scratch, I can help identify ways to make it profitable.

Wield open source as a competitive advantage

Another unfortunate misperception about open source products is that they are of a lower quality than proprietary ones. While that might be true for some that are not actively maintained, it is not true of commercial or commercially-backed open source products.

When there are dedicated, full time employees working on an open source product, it turns out to be better than its proprietary alternatives. This is why Linux dominates servers, mainframes and embedded systems, and runs on all of the top 500 supercomputers.

It is why Blender is an industry standard, used by Netflix, Sony, Disney and other major studios for animation and visual effects. It was also recently used to make the Golden Globe and Academy Award winning movie Flow.

Some other examples of open source software outperforming their proprietary counterparts are Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Apache. Nginx and TensorFlow.

I can help you use open source as a strategic weapon to leapfrog ahead of your competition.

Build and maintain a community around your product

While good design and coding are essential for any product, it is ultimately people who will determine its success. This is especially true in open source. Users will find and report bugs, and sometimes even fix them for you. They will also create useful extensions or plug-ins which will add functionality to your product and expand your market.

An enthusiastic community is your biggest strength. Unfortunately, many companies such as Redis, Elastic, MongoDB and others have found themselves in hot water over the years for changing their licences, collecting user data without consent, or doing other things that users objected to.

It resulted in a loss of trust and negative press coverage, with people creating forks to move away from these companies.

Reputation and trust are hard to build, but very easy to destroy. While Elastic and Redis later switched back to open source licences, the damage was already done and both companies lost out on a lot of business. Similarly, it took a long time for Canonical to regain people’s trust after it integrated Amazon into the Ubuntu desktop in 2012, raising privacy concerns.

Having been a part of the open source community for a long time, I can help your company avoid PR disasters before they happen.

If you would like to work with me on an open source business strategy for your company, send me an email at jairajdevadiga@gmail.com.