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Berlin, Germany
People person, technology enthusiast and all-things-open evangelist. Head of marketing at Nextcloud, previously community manager at ownCloud and SUSE and a long time KDE marketing veteran, loves biking through Berlin and cooking for friends and family. Find my personal blog here.
Authored Comments
Another one here who is worried about this site advocating open core models. They carry none of three benefits of open source for their users and no matter how carefully management handles the balance between community and enterprise features - it is fundamentally unstable.
http://blogs.gartner.com/brian_prentice/2010/03/31/open-core-the-empero… on my first point. I am happy to write on opensource.com about my second ("it is fundamentally unstable").
On the contrary, I think they are closely related. If you do something open source, a lack of transparency and collaboration can easily kill the advantages. And free, well, if you try to built a product like Nextcloud does, free is kind'a inherent in the 'open source' part, so you'll have to built something around that free availability of the product, no way around it.
I'm not saying you're crazy, just that I think that in practice, it doesn't really work to try and decouple 'free' and 'transparent' and 'open source'. You get throw-over-the-wall "open source", or open core like models. Those don't give many of the benefits of open source - in most cases the availability of source is merely a marketing thing.
Once you really want to develop a product in the open, collaboratively, you have to give the participants ownership over the product. You can't keep it half-open, under wraps, secret, non-free. That just doesn't work - it is neither respectful to the contributors nor will they accept it.
But obviously, it's a complicated subject and there are multiple ways of 'doing open source'.