Many French people are still missing a famous humorist – Pierre Desproges (you should learn French just to appreciate his words btw), who passed away more than 20 years ago (read his bio and some nice quotes here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Desproges). One of his quote is “You can laugh about anything, but not with everyone.”(when you know his quotes, it makes a lot of sense). Same with open source: you can speak about open source AND making money, but not with everyone.

As soon as some one is coming close to the duality open source / making profit, I can hear some theology, passion and irrationality. I will not blame anyone for that, I fully respect any religion, any belief and I am never arguing about what is “wrong” and what is “fair”, I am just mentioning I am entering a very dangerous area. I know that. So I put my helmet on (I like to put helmets: I am a rock climbing fan), take a deep breath and move forward:

Disclosure: if you believe Open Source is not compatible with making money, fair enough, I just recommend you leaving this blog immediately, you are warned, I cannot do anything more for you…

At Jahia (my employer), we are doing our best to make profit because you know, well, we have shareholders and also guess what, employees, who like to be paid each end of month (and – funny thing – shareholders are all employees of Jahia, more than 95% of the company belongs to its employees). So to us, open source and profit are not only living together: they are both, altogether, the whole part of our (professional) life.

I should also add that “we are not looking for” a business model, like many think or try, we have found it (the company is self funded. So since the first year we have had to be profitable and we have the same business model since the inception of the company).

If someone wants to challenge the fairness of the model, our ethic, or the fact that we are using open source as a marketing ploy, be my guest, challenge me, I am your man. Just note I will not spend my time trying to convince someone who just wants not to be convinced. But I am very much interesting into any question relative to open source and business. Please just be polite and don’t ask stupid questions. You can disagree, I love that (remember I am French, French people often like to disagree about everything), but you still need to be smart.

Matt Asay asked excellent questions about Jahia’s pay or contribute paradigm. We could write several white papers to answer all the questions raised… We like to be transparent at Jahia but I can’t just give the “magic formula” to answer his questions… because there is not a single one but several, and actually, many. So I will do my best to explicit the rationale. Again, we are transparent (e.g. we are publishing 100% publicly our pricing & our source code, tough to do more) but there are quite a few different cases, and most of them require to “negotiate”. Yes, open source, business, negotiation are living together in our world. Maybe we are just “normal” human beings, sorry for those who are against that.

So to answer some questions of Matt: how does Jahia determine the value of contributions? And how much will it discount subscription services in exchange for sponsored "contributions" that a customer pays Jahia to develop?

Well it depends…

Let me explain that, is not that simple:

Basically it is both a business issue and a fair trade. A fair trade because the community needs fairness: what we do with some one, needs to be consistent with what we do for others and a business because it is a question of cash, money, dollars, euros or whatever you want to call a financial reward. We are just also proposing the reward in nature: we have a dual licence (GPL/JSEL) schema, where the enterprise edition, fully supported by the editor, is available on a subscription basis. The free right to use the software is linked to the subscription, as a contribution reward. Why? Financing potential bug fix through a subscription is a contribution to the software as you help us to improve the quality of our code. That’s why the right of usage of Jahia EE is free during the subscription period and, more than that, may become perpetual (and still free) as an additional reward of your commitment (i.e.: 3 years of upfront payment or by purchasing the 4^th year when you have not purchased the 3 years upfront).

Following the same idea, the contribution of a software evolution from a member of the community may signify a perpetual –and free - right to use the software immediately after the contribution when this generic contribution become a part of the Jahia software distribution. All code contribution are not generic ones: users may develop, share and/or use modules on top of Jahia (which are not integrated in the Jahia distributions): these modules will have a dedicated exchange space in a near future…more to come in few weeks ;).

As a matter of fact, the Jahia team is often involved in these generic developments, financed by the customer. It’s not surprising as we are the authors of the software. Through a subscription, the software usage is free - forever in that case - within the scope of the related subscription and the maintenance of the evolution is included at no extra cost. We think, this win/win deal is really fair compares to the tons of money end-customer paid to maintain fork of code done by some services company…

But we are also very open to accept external code contribution, developed by a partner or a client already using the commercial edition of Jahia, when they actually produce the generic development we have to integrate as a part of a future release of the Jahia software: by developing a feature useful to them, they will get in return, day one, a free perpetual usage right of Jahia EE for new projects. The scope of the free perpetual usage right is calculated by using the subscription amount corresponding to the development cost. For example, if the development cost is 20 K€, the contributor will immediately have a perpetual usage right of one JVM of Jahia EE Professional (even if he doesn’t take a subscription) as the yearly subscription of one Jahia EE Professional JVM is priced at 20K€.

This option is extremely useful to clients or partners managing already Jahia’s projects in production and with plan to do some more. And Jahia is often chosen for being a global content management platform. So many of our clients are managing quite a few projects done with Jahia (intranets, extranets, site factory, …). That’s why they like this idea.

When it comes to how much: as a software editor, we are quite well aware of how many man days are required to develop a feature, or support the product (e.g. through QA or any other test). We know also how much it would cost us to implement it or do the job ourselves. So we are finding a compromise between risks, planning, and we are proposing a price to the contributor that we believe to be interesting for both parties. We are always approving the specifications – but with inputs from all involved parties - as we have the responsibility of the software, release after release.

They are rules about defining the daily rates, and how many man days. It is always a grey zone, negotiation is inevitable but that’s not something we are doing without rules, far from that. It is essential to us to be sure we are as consistent as possible with the different parties.

That said, for the community edition (the one in GPL licence mode), the model is close to any other GPL project, there is nothing specific to Jahia. But as soon as code is potentially used in the Jahia EE, we think it’s fair to reward, in a way or another, the contributor.

And will the contribution done in the commercial edition return to the community edition? Most of the time (if not almost every time), yes, definitively. Indeed, the community edition is embedding all the latest developments done but not fully stabilised for enterprise and proprietary production. The only exception I know is the so called “Jahia United Content Bus” to be revealed next week at the Gilbane conference (read cmswire’s article) as it allows connecting to close source vendors’ repository (such as Documentum, Microsoft), it does not make any sense to have it available on the community edition.

So, again, Yes, besides this particular case, by definition, a feature developed thanks to a contribution will finish into the GPL edition. We have one source code, not two.

So you can find that fair or not, aligned or not with the open source philosophy, that’s your right. We have been working this way at Jahia since 2002 and believe our eco system likes it, and that’s all we need.

More here :

http://www.jahia.com/jahia/Jahia/Home/about_us/business_model

http://www.jahia.com/jahia/Jahia/site/jahiacom/GPL