Free Software Linux

North by South has always described itself as a “free software business” (or, sometimes, an “open source business”). Interestingly enough, what exactly it means to be a free software company is something which has been the subject of debate on various blogs.

It all begins with a report titled “Open Source Is Not a Business Model,” which is available for purchase by The 451 Group, who describe themselves as “an independent technology-industry analyst company focused on the business of enterprise IT innovation.”

In February, a post on the 451 Group’s blog caused some controversy because it describes two companies as “open source vendors”. These companies use an Open Core licensing strategy. The Open Core licensing strategy is an attempt to answer the age-old question of how a company can make money by giving away their product and it describes the model that SugarCRM (amongst many others) has adopted: they give away the core application but sell feature extensions (as well as support & SaaS hosting).

The controversy is that Tarus Balog, CEO of OpenNMS Group, took issue with Matthew Aslett of The 451 Group referring to Hyperic and JasperSoft as “open source vendors.” The problem is that the partnership between these two companies (Hyperic and JasperSoft, if you’re starting to get lost) results in a product where JasperSoft’s Professional Edition is embedded in a completely closed-source, proprietary software. Since both companies do maintain and provide open source software (evaluated using the “CentOS Test“), the conclusion was that it was fair to refer to these companies as “open source vendors.”

The reason this story is relevant is that it leads into another blog post by Matthew Aslett of The 451 Group, in which he tackles a wholly different description: a “Free Software vendor”! This was prompted by a post on George Greve’s blog, titled “What makes a Free Software company?” George Greve is President of FSFE (Free Software Foundation - Europe). Mr Greve makes it very easy on all of us when he describes what he thinks a “free software company” is:
“So usage of and contribution to Free Software are not differentiators for what makes a Free Software company. The critical differentiator is provision of Free Software downstream to customers. In other words: Free Software companies are companies that have adopted business models in which the revenue streams are not tied to proprietary software model licensing conditions.”

! - so, what does that mean for NXS? Is NXS a free software company? Are we an open source company? Well, at least for the time being, we’re going to continue referring to ourselves like that, for these reasons:

1. NXS was born out of collaboration between free software programmers/managers/etc in San Francisco and Latin America. Our Developers Network is deeply involved in the free software movement happening in Latin America and we have always been very open that one of our key goals as a company is to materially support this movement.
2. NXS’s business model does not revolve around a particular piece of software that has any particular license. Instead, we use our experience in building scalable applications and migrating organizations to free software to bring free software into even more organizations. When we come into contact with a project, we demonstrate to our potential client the numerous advantages they’ll reap from adopting a technology strategy that is based on free software.
3. Sometimes, our clients are foundations or non-profits who exist to promote and develop software for the community. We definitely go out of our way to find clients like this.
4. We don’t really work with proprietary software. Sometimes, in order to meet a particular need, we have used proprietary software but only when all other options are exhausted.
5. Our business model is based around developing free software solutions which often replace proprietary solutions within organizations.

Granted, many of these reasons are dismissed in Mr Greve’s definition of a free software company. In the end, what is and is not an “open source company” or “free software company” is incredibly less important than what is a free license or not. Conclusion? If we are not a “free software company,” we’re content to build a business model that benefits not only the free software community and the phenomenal free software movement in Latin America but also companies and governments who are trapped in the stranglehold of proprietary software. That’s good enough for us, for now.