What advice would you give an entrepreneur considering basing their business on open source？

I think a lot of other people here maybe try to interest in applying what you're saying

what they're doing. One interesting application is always lesson learned. So I'd like to ask each of you, you put yourself back in the situation where you're a two-person startup

you're building an open-source product, you're hoping to sell the government, you hope to build an ecosystem, you hope to buy financially

What lesson learned along the way would you take back and apply to that two-person startup

That sounded like a Tony question. Tony Bellet. was that a 20 million fresh? No

Boy, that sounded. There's a lot of Tony Belletti sound bites in there

It's all real. So actually, I have an answer to that. Is, I wish more organizations and startups thought of open source as a tool, not as a solution

So just because what you have is open source doesn't mean you have an advantage over some

an advantage over somebody else, right? And so my message to a lot of people that

ask that question, I do get asked that question a lot, is you need to go to the fundamentals

of your business and try to sidestep the fact that you have an open source approach

and factor that in afterwards. Like, so what is it about your offering that's going to

make you money, which is also another Tony Belletti quote, that other that other

people don't have. I remember there was a number of studies launched two or

three years ago about factors contributing to the success of open source projects and so they looked at the engineers and they said well if you have this mix of engineers or this mix of experience or if you this kind of an application you more or less likely to succeed

When you looked at it, it's like, well, actually, no, the projects that were more likely to succeed

were the projects that actually solved a real pain point in somebody's lives

that they were willing to pay for. And so that would be my advice

advice is try to look at it objectively independent of the fact that it's open

source and then factor that in and then when it comes to factoring it in the

number one piece of advice I would have is get your license right from the

beginning so look at your five-year plan look at what you hook your business is

doing five years from now and ask yourself does your license meet that

objective because I've seen a lot of organizations that just throw their arms up and say

well, we're going to do everything, you know, GPL, we're going to do the kind of the classic venture capital started

GPL plus commercial license, and away we go. And then they get to five years and go

oh, shoot, that's not actually what we want. We're having difficulties partnering with other commercial software organizations

because our license doesn't jive well with them. So that would be the number one sticking point that I see

To paraphrase, Dawn, just to make sure we've got it. crisply, spend as little as you possibly can on the stuff as commodity, focus on the unique value and put your effort there and figure out is that really what customers want

Are they going to pay you money for that you value? Yes

If yes, then you're on the right track. I should have just said that. Yeah

Anybody else want to comment on that? Well, I've been through this

God, how many stories can I tell you? I will tell you

No, I will tell you one of my own stories and one from somebody else that I think were

probably really appropriate for this kind of thing. So it sort of touched on the exactly of those things were there So first of all I know so here the full disclosure I said earlier I went to Thailand and met all these people that knew me and I don know them well part of that was we created a piece of software

around these other open source technology builds and it was an authoring kind of

environment we went out there we made it open sorts made it available it was really sort of ahead of time at that point time quite unique and we watched the downloads

people got and they went out there and they got so so and we got feedback and people love this

and when we released a piece of technology there was somebody wrote an emailing list

DM solutions throw it down everybody had clapped in the office and but you know what

two years later I can't think of one sale that was related to that and I certainly

can't think of a line of code that was contributed to that project that was put into it

even though there are many tens of thousands of people out there using it

And so wonderful success story from an open source perspective, but a horrible experience from a business and commercial standpoint

And it was exactly that problem, which was, you know what, the world needs this

Well, turn out the world needed it, but it made no difference in my business

And so as a consequence, guess what, the project couldn't be sustained

because we were the only ones to do not do anything else. Nobody else wanted to contribute, they just wanted to use it

And it died. So it ended up being a total failure at the end of the day

So not only was a failure from a business perspective, it was a failure for an open source project

So having your ducks in a row and understanding why you're doing it

and what you're going to gain as a business and really how that's going to make your business better in the long run

is absolutely critical before you make sense. I mean, it is a tool totally

So, you know, that was one of my biggest lessons of all was going through that process. Another one, which I thought was kind of interesting

is in the data side of things. So it was a little bit related, but still similar. So in the

UK had a very restrictive policy about access to map data The origin survey gives a real clamp down in terms of access to data And so there was this initiative called OpenStreetMath which was born which was basically a reactive thing to this

And it was brilliant. I mean, it came out and said, you know what? We heard of people who go out there and collect your GPS, put their points in

and be able to say, you're not going to give us the data? Fine, we'll create it ourselves

And you know what? It's been extremely successful. I encourage anybody to go check out OpenStreetMath.org

It's really an interesting project. But here's what happened. So the guy who was doing this also had ink

so that he was going to make his money out something out here once he figured

all that once it's got going everybody started contributing and making us happen then he go out makes money so he goes out and sure enough goes all these

conferences everybody gets excited and people start contributing and all those data starts coming in recently he's gone and said okay I'm going to start to

commercialize this I'm gonna offer this now as my own tiling service for maps and

I got to bring in and make it successful the problem was it chose a creative

Commons license for the data which meant that any piece of software that meant to use

this data could get infected so effectively it wasn't even just like if you wanted

to use this in anything that was at all proprietary it was potentially infected

so it meant you couldn't anything that you were not prepared to completely make

available to the public domain and your entire software world of it could not use

his data and suddenly this guy was left and now said well what do I do right so

So they've gone through a process of having to go through a whole new license for this. But worse yet, they have to get permission from every single contributor on that data to change the license

So it's a horrible nightmare. And so that's one little mistake about licensing

Chose the right license on that data in the first place. Could save himself free

Now, you know, it's sort of working out, but I'm sure he's really kicking himself in terms of grief

He's working his way through it. But those are kinds of things that you just don't make that little step to really think through what you're doing and why you're doing it

From a business perspective, you will get hammered. And that's just the way the business is rules

So, so