One of the first steps towards open sourcing the RedMonk business model came with the release of our Compliance Oriented Architecture publication under a Creative Commons license. We’ve had probably a few hundred conversations on both the content and the licensing choice since them, and responses with respect to the license have varied, ranging from “brilliant” to “insane” and everything in between.
Our feelings on the matter are relatively simple; we view open source as both inevitable and a potential boon to our business if it’s appropriately leveraged. Unlike some of our larger, better known competitors, we’re in the comfortable position of not having:
a.) an absurdly large revenue stream from publication sales (we already forgo a very sizable opportunity by refusing commissioned research opportunities) to protect
b.) to answer to shareholders why we’re risking the revenue stream from (a)
c.) any notion that we could – or should – exert absolute control of our content in the wild
As Jonathan Schwartz has noted in the past, open standards favor the laggards. Well, in similar fashion I think open source, or in this case open content, favors the little guy. I’ve always liked Salesforce’s ambition of turning a $9B CRM market into a $5B one, and if people scaled as well as software we’d likely have the same goals for the analyst business. As it is, however, we’re content to be the firm that most actively embraces open source, in addition to actually covering it. Judging by the impact our CC licensed blogs have had on things interesting (pageviews) and important (new client wins), we’re pretty sure that an open content model is the best way for us going forward.
But what do vendors think of the approach? Well, it’s taking some time to sink in, no question, because it’s different, but EMC/Documentum at least seems to get it (they’re not a subscriber, incidentally). After a briefing I took with them around an upcoming product, in which COA was prominently discussed, they saw fit to take the content and run with it in this CC licensed vendor whitepaper.
Cost to EMC for this “whitepaper?” Zero dollars. Seriously. Why do this? We believe that in many cases, authority – which is largely dependent on visibility – will be more valuable over the long term relative to a single revenue opportunity. Put another way, is the revenue in the paper itself, or the services that go around it? I’m not sure, but I personally don’t think software’s going to be the only thing that shifts towards low or no cost.
Anyway, this is all a long winded way of saying that we were happy to see EMC’s Creative Commons play, hope that we see a lot more of this.
No Comments