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Profiting from Open Source Software
Secret Santa writes "Alex Salkever has written an inspiring and Linux-friendly piece about Martin Roesch -- how he went from writing open-source software to building a multimillion dollar company. Excerpt: 'Sourcefire is one of a growing number of small software players that have built new businesses around open-source code. Their business models contain various mixes of proprietary and open-source software components and span the software gamut, from other security companies such as Tripwire to database outfits such as MySQL and desktop-computing offerings like Xandros. Most are still small, with revenues well under $50 million.'"
I am currently employed by a Sourcefire reseller and must say that I really enjoy working with the company. The philosophies of most of those employed by SF fall squarely in line with my philosophies, so that helps. They don't seem... evil. Plus - they have a cool office, that helps, right?
Post-rock/Ambient/Drone and other noise.
Make a package that everyone loves (starting as open source), then either get bought up by some company for your copious skills at making such a well-loved package, or making a proprietary add-on ... it's something I've failed doing time and time again. I'm glad to see that it does indeed work from time to time, else we might see fewer and fewer contributions to open source than we do.
This is timely; I was just thinking about a similar thing this morning. Back in the 1980's and 90's, one could start up a software company which filled a niche, and take it to profitablility and even an IPO, without the usual VC BS. Borland comes to mind, but there are many other examples. All of this was before Software Patents really came along.
I haven't seen anyone doing this lately; at least, not outside of Open Sourced efforts. It seems like if you go the closed source, proprietary route these days, you'd better have a good deal of cash to fight the Patent Wars against the freeloading lawyers who come along. I can think of several examples. Yet no one seems to target the Open Source Companies and try to shut them down. So it seems like this is the only way the little guy can hope to win, without having to bend over for the VCs.
So, my question to the community is this: Are they any modern examples out there where an individual can successfully go it alone these days (all the way to IPO)? And if not (or if these are the exceptions), to what degree is this due to Software Patents?
My suspicion is that there aren't any, or at least many, modern examples these days of people being successful without the money to create one's own patent portfolio and defend themselves, legally. And if this is indeed the case, it's a superb example of how software patents have hurt the industry, rather than helped it.
This is the guy behind Snort and Sourceforge
/. there's a big difference. Sourcefire is a company that sells proprietary interfaces to open source security software. Sourceforge is a repository for open source software and a focal point of the open source community.
He's behind Sourcefire, not Sourceforge. Though his open source software is stored in the Sourceforge repository.
Though it is probably superfluous to point it out here at
Besides, open source keeps you honest. If developers see shitty coding practices it will out and/or be cleaned up, rather than swept under the rug.
Also good for software enhancement as it's more democratic this way. Pretty much anything I've ever come up with, on my time, I've released with the code. Though I doubt much of it has made it's way to sourceforge. I'd only care if someone slapped their name on it and claimed it as their's, particularly if they were selling the product commercially.
Profiting from Open Source Software 101:
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Having done some work with SourceFire's products (I worked on a contract that accounted for a majority of their total deployed IDS boxes in existence at one point), I have mixed feelings about the company. Yeah, meeting Marty is cool, and the pink pig T-shirts are cute, and it's worth some amount of geek points to say that I've used their stuff. But the products they sell and the company itself suffer from the exact same problems that plague all other IT companies.
Even though the under-the-hood technology is k3wl and using Snort sigs is l33t, the admin and management tools are frankly not up to par compared to other offerings out there. I mean, it's not as bad as ManHunt, but it still takes waaay too many mouse clicks and unnecessary repetition by a human to get simple admin tasks done. I've seen gigs of sensor data lost to DB corruption (thankfully nothing critical) and have gone through the whole oh-crap we'll-get-that-critical-bug-fixed-next-release trip with them more than once. Support is a mixed bag, sometimes excellent, sometimes okay, sometimes really slow and annoying.
Bottom line is, companies are companies, there's nothing magical about open-source ones that make their products inherently better or more desirable for any other reason than to boost one's ego and to say that You Were There Back When. If I were recommending an IDS product line to a customer (which I probably wouldn't do anyway), I would encourage them to do some careful research before settling on SF.
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK