Based on research being undertaken at Carleton University’s TIM program (of which I am a graduate) Peter Carbone (Nortel) and Tony Bailetti (Carleton) have developed a model of the open source engagements strategies organizations use. Broken into 5 types of interactions, Carbone & Bailetti break down the actions and benefits of each strategy. This type of work highlights the shifting maturity of open source users who now realize that open source can be used for much more than a shortcut to product release.
The Carbone/Bailetti interaction strategy model
The model is comprised of five interaction strategies. Appropriated value is increased as the number or projects interacted with increases. In latter stages value is created and captured based on the interactions with open source. (from http://www.slideshare.net/brianhurley/day-2-morning-open-source-carbone-and-weiss)
Strategy Zero: Denial
In this strategy (or lack thereof) an organization denies the existence of open source or denies the benefits, either way the organization does not interact with open source in any way.
Engineering driven strategies
The first three strategies are engineering driven in nature. They are used in order to decrease operating costs and/or time to market. Organizations employ these strategies in order to increase product reliability while at the same time decreasing needed maintenance resources. These strategies are in-line with the more traditional definition of how to appropriate value from open source.
Strategy one: Use
In the use strategy, organizations interact with open source by consuming projects. This could be the use of open source tools to aid in development or open source servers to reduce deployment costs. The use strategy provides an organization with no competitive advantage in the marketplace and has little or no impact on the open source community.
Strategy two: Contribution
Contributors interact with open source projects by providing resources and source code to an existing project. At this stage, the organization does not have a controlling stake in the project but rather provides code in order to make it more suitable for their use. The contribution strategy affords an organization with no advantage in the marketplace but does add value to the open source community by expanding and maintaining a project.
Strategy three: Champion
Champion organizations provide resources, leadership and vision to an open source project. In this interaction the organization has a controlling stake in the project and works hard to ensure the project is a success. At this point an organization is able to guide the evolution of the project in a direction that is beneficial to them. An organization employing the champion strategy becomes involved in marketing the project within the OSS community in order to attract new developers and users. The open source community benefits from organized leadership and increased publicity/marketing of one or more championed projects.
Business driven strategies
Where the first three strategies were driven by engineering, the fourth and fifth stages are driven by business and the drive to create value from the interaction. In these strategies, an organization interacts with multiple projects in order to create value. These types of interactions lead to the formation of ecosystems due to their binding nature.
Strategy four: Collaboration
Collaborating organizations exert influence in their segment to make the operating conditions favourable to them. Collaborating organizations interact across multiple projects in order to provide total solutions for their customers. This provides a competitive advantage to collaborating organizations since they provide a solution rather than one of its parts. Collaborating organizations provide the open source community with new applications and a commitment to maintaing the health of multiple projects, possibly leading to the creation of a new ecosystem.
Strategy five: Redefinition
In this strategy, an organization has gone beyond collaborating to shift the market in their favour. In this strategy an organization is able to react across multiple projects in order to redefine their offerings to customers based on the customer’s needs. This interaction gives redefining organization a marked advantage over their non-redefining competitors: they can pick and choose products that help them meet their customer’s needs providing a solution tailored to them. In this strategy an ecosystem is formed around the newly defined business model in order to serve the customers.
The road ahead
The Carbone/Bailetti model highlights the fact that open source can be used as much more than a way to cut costs or improve product reliability. Open source can be used to generate and capture value and to create ecosystems around which business models can be defined and redefined to meet customer need. This relatively new view on open source brings to light the maturing of organizations who once viewed open source as uncoordinated hackers taking a stab at software development.
