HP’s Marten Mickos: Open Source Is Not a Business Model

By Jack M. Germain 02/23/15 2:58 PM PT

Marten Mickos, senior vice president and general manager of HP's cloud unit, advocates making money from open source. He preaches what at first glance may appear to be two opposing business models.

One is the notion that developing open source software entails meeting a reciprocity requirement. The other is the idea that using open source software does not require any reciprocity.

Marten Mickos, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the HP Cloud Unit

Mickos is a seasoned open source executive with a passion for infrastructure software. He was previously the CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, an open source, AWS-compatible cloud provider. Before that he was CEO of MySQL, where he grew the company from garage startup to the second-largest open source company in the world.

In learning to adapt his business strategies to make open source profitable, Mickos succeeded where many others have failed.

Unlike some who develop open source software or sell services surrounding it, Mickos fervently believes that open source is not a business model unto itself. If you try to upsell free users to paying customers, your business likely will fail.

Mickos should know the risky business of trying to convert free users into paying customers. At MySQL, he had 15 million users of the product and 15 thousand paying customers.

In this exclusive interview, LinuxInsider discusses with Marten Mickos some of the misconceptions about open source as a standalone business model.

LinuxInsider: You once said that the only two ways a company makes money with open source is to affiliate with a foundation or have a business model where the open source project and the open source company are practically the same thing. Is that philosophy still valid with today's open source dominance in the cloud?

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HP's Marten Mickos: Open Source Is Not a Business Model