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Tag: Licensing

  • Why is open source content rare?

    Why is open source content rare?

    Open source community incentives are biased to prefer developers over content creators. Open source communities are particularly prone to this failure mode. After all, the developers in the community are all doing their work for valid reasons, so why wouldn’t content creators join them? Hot take: the incentives are different. Open source…

  • Supporting Ancient Software

    Supporting Ancient Software

    With another round of fixes to Windows XP, the time is ripe for bloviating about supporting ancient stuff. Every software vendor has to decide what to do about supporting what they used to ship, as well as the broader ecosystem around them. Operating systems, databases, service providers. Maximize use of…

  • Land and Expand Packaging Decisions

    Land and Expand Packaging Decisions

    Subsets of packaged content are needed in different system classes. If you’re pursuing a land-and-expand model, then you need to have a way to expand. One way is to ship a static monolith with features turned off. Another is to ship dynamic add-ons to your base product.  Teams make these…

  • Licensing thoughts, round two

    Licensing thoughts, round two

    License Models Suck got a lot of interesting conversations started (and there’s a roundup page), time to revisit from the customer’s perspective. Let’s also be clear, this is enterprise sales with account reps and engineers: self-service models are for another day. As a vendor, the options I describe seem clearly…

  • License models suck

    Most license models suck in some way: Flat rate sucks for the vendor because it leaves money on the table from large customers. This can be acceptable for an inherently limited product model (e.g. per user with a bulk discount), but it is not ideal for scalable enterprise software. Per…