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Open Core: The worst of both worlds
by Sander MarechalA lot has been written recently about so called “Open Core” software ever since Andrew Lampitt coined the term back in August of 2008. Many analysts have been critical about it, such as Richard Hillesley from The H Open in his recent article “Open core, closed heart?”. Many are also very positive about it such as Matt Aslett from The 451 Group. However, I think that most them are missing the elephant in the room: Open core is not sustainable in the long term because it represents the worst of both worlds. Open core tries to find a middle ground between proprietary software and free software, but it reaps the benefits of neither and inherits the problems of both.
Let me show you by example. SugarCRM is one of the more popular open core software products available. The company offers the Community Edition for free under a GPLv3 license but also offers a Professional and Enterprise edition under a proprietary license. SugarCRM has been around since 2004 but it is already showing many signs of not being sustainable.
Digg this article: 
It's official: ATI Radeon drivers to be open sourced
It's tuning out to be a great week. First OOXML defeated (for a few months) and now this:
AMD briefed Linux.com this morning on a pending announcement regarding the open sourcing of drivers for ATI graphics cards. It's official -- AMD will make code and specifications for ATI graphics cards available on the Internet on September 10.
On the issue of maintainership, Schlaeger says, "We want to enable the open source community to carry the development forward. We won't let them alone. It's not something that we dump a bit of code, a bit of spec, and say, 'This is it. You asked for it, you have it. Feel free, and have fun.'" He noted that the company took a similar approach on the Linux port of Opteron.
