One key way Open Source Software is different from classic Commercial software is that not every user is going to be a customer. In fact, for most successful Open Source projects, the number of users and uses is orders of magnitude more than the number of customers and “paid” deployments.

You may argue Commercial Open Source is just a case of “Freemium” model, which a lot of SaaS solutions use, yet there is a difference, if you have a SaaS you have total control over changing what is included in “free forever” plan and what is not, whereas in open source there’s much more nuance.

For simplicity, let’s focus on Single Vendor Open Source, where a single commercial company has all IP (trademark, source code, etc.) related to a given Open Source Project. From that company’s point of view, there are N deployments of the project, showing its traction, and P% of those are paying customers. These paid customers can be running the “Enterprise” version, Support Subscribers, or running in your Cloud.

The number of paying deployments (D) equals N × P if P is a proportion, or N × (P/100) if P is a percentage. So to drive it up, you can either increase N or increase P%. To increase your Sales $$$, you also can increase the number of $ you get per deployment, though trying to grow your business only through price increases is usually a very slippery slope.

With basic math out of the way, let’s talk about a couple of mistakes I see over and over again, which can cause catastrophic outcomes for the project, and which are basically on the opposite ends of the spectrum.

Implementing Open Source Crippleware strategy

First, if you just listen to members of the Sales team, they often hate what the Paid version needs to compete with the Free version. In their mind, if only they could avoid “losing to Free and Open Source,” they would easily hit their quota many times over. As such, they often would advocate for increasing differentiation, which often means crippling the free and Open Source version. This, of course, can increase the P% and, especially short term, can give a very positive boost to sales, as it often takes a while for your users to find a feasible alternative.

Over time, though, you often would see your user base stagnate and shrink, and with N going down, there is only so much and so long you can continue by increasing P% and raising prices.

Furthermore, it is very possible for members of your community to come together and exercise their “right to fork,” which is unique to open source and which does not exist for “Freemium” SaaS Software. We have seen it happen with Redis, Elastic, MySQL, Terraform, and OpenOffice, among others.

Not enough Differentiation

Having said that, not having enough differentiation is problematic, too. Even if the number of deployments is insanely high, if your P% is zero… you’re obviously not making any money. You need to make sure there is a reason for customers to pay, and most likely it should not be charity/donation-based, as those do not scale and are hard to secure on an ongoing basis (though I’ve seen small projects successfully funded through donations, I would not call it a sustainable business model).

How to avoid those mistakes?

As Garima Kapoor, co-founder of MinIO, put it: “Never let monetization interfere with adoption.” I think it is a great way to think about this problem—you want everyone to be able to use your Open Source project and find it awesome for the purpose, yet you want those with the ability to pay to be motivated to do so. It can be a hard balance to find, but it is essential for long-term success.

Want to talk about where balance can be for your project? Drop me a line.

 Subscribe via RSS

The post Typical Mistakes in Open Source Sales appeared first on Peter Zaitsev.

It’s no longer surprising when a corporate-owned open source project abruptly shifts to a more restrictive ‘source-available’ license, such as SSPL or BSL. However, foundation-backed open source software has traditionally offered greater stability in this regard. While commercial sponsors may change and funding levels can fluctuate, the underlying software license has generally remained the same.

That’s what makes the whole NATS situation so unusual—and honestly, a bit alarming. If Synadia manages to pull NATS out of the CNCF and switch its license, it could shake people’s trust in the idea that foundation-governed open source projects are safe from that kind of change.

Here is CNCF message,  response from Synadia’s Derek  Collison (original creator of NATS), and also HackerNews discussion  for those seeking more first-hand information on this topic  

I won’t go over the whole story again, but I do want to call out a few key points.

First off, I think the NATS community deserves to have a say—this isn’t a decision Derek and Synadia should be making on their own. If supporting open source NATS just isn’t sustainable for them anymore, they should fork the project, apply whatever license they want, and pour their resources into that new version. Maybe that new fork takes off and NATS fades out. Or maybe the community rallies, new sponsors step in, and NATS keeps thriving as an open source project. Either way, the choice should be in the hands of the community, not a single company.

Second, donating a project to the CNCF should be a one-way street. You can’t just take it back later—and honestly, that’s kind of the whole point. It’s about giving the community ownership and ensuring the project lives beyond the original sponsor’s control.

Third, if Synadia really wants a commercially licensed version of the NATS server, there’s nothing stopping them from doing that, without needing to “take back” or fork the whole thing. They could offer something like “Synadia Enterprise for NATS” and still benefit from the brand recognition they’ve built. What they wouldn’t get, of course, is exclusive control over the NATS name, which might be what they’re really after.

Finally, there’s a lesson here for the CNCF too. If it wants people to trust the projects it hosts, it needs to make sure situations like this don’t happen. That means locking down all the key assets—like trademarks and licensing rights—before fully accepting a project. If things are still legally messy, like with the NATS trademark, maybe those projects should be flagged with a different status to show they’re not yet fully aligned with CNCF’s IP and governance standards.

 Subscribe via RSS

The post NATS goes Nuts – Quite Unique Open Source controversy appeared first on Peter Zaitsev.

Online Events is a great way to engage the community allowing for establishing deeper connection than you get from written costs, while a lot more cost effective than in-person event and having global reach. 

Yet I think the full value of such Online Events is often not understood and measured correctly, leading to failing to get the full possible value from them. There tends to be excessive focus on the events themselves – how many people have registered and attended the event, rather than the value of the full cycle – Before, During, and After the event. 

First, let’s clarify what I mean by Online events – It is anything ranging from a simple Webinar to an Online Conference or even a Hybrid Event – coming up with a great online experience for such events comes at extra cost and is better measured on its own. 

Before Event

Promoting an Event is a great way to attract attention to your brand and build your position as a thought leader. It is not as direct as you asking people to buy your product and as such can have a better organic response. Speakers are also often open to promoting themselves by speaking at your event, helping to increase the reach and build your brand reputation. While driving registration is the important value you achieve from the actions before events, it is not the only one. At the same time, we need to ensure that as many people as possible attend our event. The typical attendance rate for free events currently does not exceed 30% of the registered participants. To increase this percentage, engaging the registered audience through captivating email campaigns or social posts before the event, sending reminders, and organizing the registration form with the participant’s calendar is necessary.

During Event

During the event you can measure the number of people who showed up, and their participation level – did they stay for a whole event or drop off after 5 minutes as well as engagement – were there any questions or discussions going on or was the audience totally passive? Increasing the audience’s activity is also a task for the organizers. Whether you engage people in a chat or conduct surveys, these activities need to be prepared in advance.

Post Event

In my opinion, post-event value is actually the most important – if set up correctly the event can provide value for months or even years after completion, especially if you do the extra work. These days you will see many people prefer to consume the content at their own convenience rather than specific time, often at accelerated speed, or skipping “boring parts”, so providing recording and slides (if applicable) is great. Providing subtitles and translation is also a great idea, allowing you to engage with non-English speakers and to consume your content when Audio is not appropriate (i.e. during mandatory boring meetings). Having such Online Event content transformed into a Blog Post/Article or a few allows us to engage people who prefer written content and deliver organic search traffic long term. “Bite-sized” key quotes or video snippets can be great on social media to help establish your brand as a leader and motivate people to review recorded content. In some cases, you can also use content delivered to produce some additional collateral – checklist, workbook, evaluation, etc.

Maximizing Total Value from Online Events, as you can see requires significant additional effort. From a resource planning standpoint, I would see the Events team needing to plan at least 3x as much time to run delivering a great event as a speaker does for their preparation and event participation. This effort should not stop at the Online portion of the event completion – plan for at least 50% of the effort on post-event activities to maximize the value of an online event.   

If you do not have all the resources you need in-house? Consider supplementing your team with Underdog Consulting 

Looking for new and creative ideas on how to improve your business? Let’s chat! 

 Subscribe via RSS

The post Maximizing and Measuring Total Value of Online Events appeared first on Peter Zaitsev.

Early in 2024 a group of friends and I are going to climb Aconcagua in Argentina –  the highest mountain in the Americas, and anywhere outside of Asia (6961m or 22837ft). We have a couple of spots open for community members interested in joining us for this adventure. 

I think it is fun to go into the adventure with a group of people sharing similar interests (besides high mountains) so if you want to join us we want you to proclaim your love for Open Source and your belief that Oracle is an evil empire… or at least have a point of view on the topic ?

Trip Details 

We are looking to do the 360 Traverse route with Inka Expeditions. This route has ascent and descent on different faces allowing you to see Aconcagua from different sides and generally more variance. In our private group, we’re also looking to add additional contingency days for weather and acclimatization issues to maximize our chance of reaching the summit.  

Trip Dates: January 5 to January 25, 2024

Trip Cost: $4200    

This cost does not include Airfare, Tips, Equipment Rental, Park Entrance Fee, Additional Porter Charges, and High Mountain Insurance.

Health and Fitness Requirements 

Aconcagua does not require advanced mountaineering technical skills, outside of those taught during the trip, yet it is a high mountain and ascent will require you to work long hours at high altitude with a backpack in the cold weather specifically. Because we want to maximize the success of this group, we have general requirements (though we will consider exceptions on an individual basis):

• – Experience with multi-day expeditions
• – Experience of 5000m (16000ft) altitude.  
• – You need to know how your body handles altitude and how to acclimatize properly
• – Being able to hike hard terrain for 10h a day
• – Being able to carry 25kg (55lb backpack)
• – Experience using crampons 

Interested? Fill out this form and we will be in touch!

 Subscribe via RSS

The post Want to join me and other Geeks climbing Aconcagua? appeared first on Peter Zaitsev.

In some circles I have a reputation of looking for trouble by pursuing reckless activities, compare me to real daredevils though and I may be living a pretty flavorless life – our approach to risk, and risk tolerance is very relative. 

Risk tends to be highly emotional and we rarely analyze it rationally, yet I think this is exactly what we should do to take wise decisions on how much risk is acceptable in our life.

The first thing to know – there is always a risk to your life and limb and you can’t eliminate it. In fact, there are a lot of stats collected about it, used for things like life insurance or estimating the cost of retirement:

(Probability of Death per year at given age)

Me being a male in my 40s the average chance of death in a given year is roughly 1/1000 or 0.1% even if I have an average mellow life. If you obsess with a healthy lifestyle and avoid anything remotely risky in your life. It is also interesting to look at the probability of dying in a car crash as another baseline figure – in the US there is roughly 0.01% of dying from a car crash a year (slightly higher in North Carolina) where I live. 

Using these numbers it becomes possible to put various activities in perspective.

Running a Marathon has a risk of death of roughly  1/100000 (probably skewed towards people with underlying conditions) which is 1/100 of the baseline yearly number or roughly 4 days – nothing to worry about, especially considering the benefits of long-distance running which reduce your baseline risk and increase your quality of life. 

Let’s look at something else I enjoy – mountaineering. This activity has some very dangerous options, such as Annapurna with a fatality rate of roughly 30%, to which even some of the most experienced people are not immune.    

You’re statistically risking decades of your life by attempting to Climb Annapurna, which is well outside of my comfort zone at this point. Many other activities bring adrenaline-joy and a sense of achievement to my life, without being so risky. 

Let’s look at a more mellow mountain – Mont Blanc. I can’t find the exact official number but a reasonable estimate puts it at 0.15% – quite a number. The problem with such a number though it counts all the death, not breaking down it by cause, and for such an easily accessible mountain as Mont Blanc, there is likely to be many people going on their own without proper equipment and experience, to their demise. How much is there a risk for individuals with reasonable climbing experience, attempting a summit with an experienced guide in good conditions? I’d expect about 1/5th of the baseline or 0.03% which is not as bad – corresponding to 3-4 months of risk when living a boring life.

Looking at outdoor adventures, in particular, I like to look at kinds of risks that are not that much related to individual skill and fitness – rock falls, avalanches, weather – although all these risks can be managed to a certain extent, they can’t be eliminated completely. On mentioned Annapurna – more than half of deaths are Avalanche related. I put a special significance on such risk related to luck rather than preparedness.

You could also use this approach to think about your behavior during the Covid-19 pandemic, at least when it comes to your personal safety rather than the social impact of spreading the virus. I know a number of people who had embraced severe isolation and restriction for fear of their life for the better part of 2 years, this is of course not my choice. 

Early in the pandemic, when the probability of death was high, it was 0.2% for someone in their early 40s. If you multiply this by additional chance of being expected when being extremely cautious of 25% this gives you a chase of death of 0.05% or something which corresponds to 6 months of background risk – not something which would “stop me from living my life”. 

This brings us to another very personal topic – to what extent we can tolerate “inconveniences” and to what extent we value “fun” in life which can be bad for our longevity. I think most of us do not spend a lot of time thinking about it and even if we do lack self-control to follow through on behavior we consider rational. 

Things like exercising or healthy eating are well proven to reduce your risk of death (and increase quality of life) but very hard for many to follow through on consistent basics. Many healthy habits like sanitizing hands or wearing masks during COVID times fall into the same group. Some people are rational and find it easy to consistently follow “best practices”, for me though it is not easy to build habits when they require doing something which does not give instant gratification, so I am trying to be very deliberate in picking my fights. 

Being able to express risks and rewards mathematically would surely help me – instead what we get in most cases are just recommendations with no numbers to back me up. For example, my Dermatologist recommended me to put sunscreen on in the morning every day but would be completely at a loss when I would ask her to quantify the impact on the probability of getting skin cancer vs just using sunscreen when significant exposure to the sun is expected. As such this is not a habit I chose to develop. 

The amount of risk you are ready to take should always be your personal choice. There is no such thing as risky or not risky – risk is not binary, and risk can never be entirely avoided. Calculating and managing risk can lead to a life that is exciting and still relatively safe.

 Subscribe via RSS

The post Probabilistic Approach to Risk in Life appeared first on Peter Zaitsev.