Fan.
Senior open source worker Imran Ghory said that the current business model of the open source world has basically merged into four models: open core, professional services, hosting and marketing( Marketplace).
Currently successful cases of the open core model include Confluent, Elastic and GitHub.
In the business model of the open core company, the commercial products and the open core are complementary, rather than conflicting. Common models mainly include the enterprise model that provides management tools and the model that provides solutions. The key to this model is not to let the community feel that the important features of the core product are reserved, and to focus on features that are valuable to business users, or features that are unlikely to be provided by the community and are not in the open core roadmap.
The successful cases in the professional service model are Hortonworks and Redhat.
Early open source models are usually based on professional services, and companies need to pay for support and consulting. Although many companies have adopted this model and reached a certain scale, they have also encountered many challenges. Because service income is unpredictable, and a lot of human resources need to be invested, once income changes, it will face great risks.
The more important point is that the profit of the company that provides the service will be much less than that of the company that provides the product. Taking Red Hat as an example, its profit on services is 31%, while its profit on product subscriptions is 93%. In other words, to recruit a core developer, Red Hat’s profit from consulting must be three times that of the product.
Successful cases in the managed service model include companies such as MongoDB.