From open core to complimentary services

SpringSource recently announced a change in their open source strategy. SpringSource’s dm Server project (a Java/Spring application server) was previously monetized using the open core model in which a product’s core functionality is available as open source and a commercial version of the product is sold with a different license agreement and/or an enhanced feature set. SpringSource has decided to move to a complimentary service model in which the product is offered entirely free of charge and subscriptions for support can be purchased.

As organizations better understand their own offerings, the markets they operate in and open source  itself, changes in strategy and business model can be beneficial to their ability to create value. As an acquisition of VMWare, there may be ulterior motives to this strategy switch which is counter to what has been happening in the open source word as of late. Savio Rodrigues of InfoWorld weighed in on the switch  here stating that:

“It doesn’t take a crystal ball to see that VMware is attempting to drive dm Server adoption through the Eclipse Foundation and monetize the adoption when operations team want to deploy dm Server applications on Cloud infrastructure. The dm Server support subscriptions are a stop gap until VMware can build out its cloud offerings and dm Server adoption increases.”

Read Savio’s whole post here.