In part one of our interview, we spoke to Steven Noels about how the company he works for, Outerthought, makes money out of open-source software. As well as using open-source software written by others within its business, Outerthought has also released some of its own code as open source. Much of this code was originally written to meet a customer's needs. We wanted to find out whether they had found the experience positive. In particular, we wondered whether they'd had any contributions to their projects from the community.
"It has happened, but not at a particularly high rate. It's a give and take situation. If we had been able to put more effort into quickly building a community around the project I'm sure this would have happened sooner. For xReporter, our Web-based reporting tool, around one year after release, users started to appear, and we were being asked questions on our mailing lists. It's now two years after release, and we're not answering all of the questions ourselves any more. We have users helping each other, so that's one thing. We don't have to provide support any more, at least not first-level support. We see users helping each other, and that's nice."
Noels points out that they have reached the stage where there are outside contributors to the project: "We've voted in two outside developers, just a month ago. They started using it, they seemed like smart guys, they fitted well with our ideas, and they felt at home in the project. We said we're going to give you guys commit access, so you don't have to provide us with patches, you can just have your own way with the code base. That' something which took us two years. You get what you put into it -- we're not always able to put as much energy into the project as we want, but if you're patient enough you eventually succeed."
Outerthought has also found that releasing some software as open source can prove to be an effective advert for the company's services. "The other perspective is that the project is there, people can use it, they don't have to pay a licence fee, and they can start playing around with it. Eventually they may have problems and requirements that are not solved by the project", says Noels.
Outerthought has won business on exactly this principle: "We have that situation with a US company. The initial development was funded by a Belgian company, one of our largest customers. A US company wanted to use the same framework for one of their customers, but they wanted some stuff that the software lacked. They contacted us and asked if we could add it to the project. This meant that although the first customer had to pay for the project, he got additional features for free, because we built those for the next customer and we asked them if we'd be able to release the changes and additions as open source as well".
"We gave a total estimate of one man-year of work for the initial release, and we've already added half a man-year of additional stuff onto it funded by other customers. The original customer just had to upgrade to get the additional features for free. So there are two sides to it: the community adding stuff to the project, and things that come out of customer requirements."
Noels says that persuading a customer to have a project they'd commissioned released as open source was easy, given the right argument. "We had a discussion with the first customer. They had a choice between paying us a certain price per day, or paying less than that but having the project released as open source. Now, the pricing difference helps. It helps the customer to persuade his bosses that it's a good idea." It wasn't all about money though, as Noels points out: "In this case, it also felt logical for them to release this stuff as open source. Why? Because if you look at the way we do database reporting, that's hardly the core business of our customers. It's a tool they need to support their business, but it's not what they actually do."
"The thing that is expensive, and which is very proprietary, is the datasets they are querying, not the reporting tool itself. It's also a matter of pricing -- if you're going to buy this many licences of Crystal Reports, it's going to cost this much, for that you can commission your own reporting system. This means it will do exactly what you want, and if it's released as open source afterwards it might, in the longer term, do even more stuff that's funded by other people."
