I recently read a blog post by Savio Rodrigues in Infoworld that started off with the premise that “Cash is Still King”. That’s a pretty hard statement to disagree with. The post, however, went on to talk about which open source business models would or wouldn’t be successful. This is where I think Savio’s logic went a little off track.

The key question of his post comes down to this – is support valuable to customers if the product is free. The answer to this is absolutely yes. I don’t have to theorize on this, because we have real data to back this up. When real data is available, I’d always rather listen to the reality of the market.

So what’s the data? Let me start with our own experience. At OpenLogic, we provide support and updates for 350 open source packages. You can split hairs about whether we are selling a subscription (and therefore product), but the reality is most of our customers pay us because they want support. Most of them have never paid for the open source product they are using. They just want support. Some of them have paid for a subscription from another vendor in the past, but now come to us because they want to aggregate their open source support needs and/or get support more cost effectively. Customers are choosing to buy “only support” every day. We are not the only company with this experience. Others are doing the same. And customers are buying.

“Well of course”, you say, “some customers might pay for support, but are there enough customers that want to buy support to make it a viable business model? Savio seems to believe that the business model will only work until a company is a certain size, and then won’t work any more. We don’t have any facts to answer that question, since RedHat is the largest example we have of a pure open source company. So let’s go back to first principles and look at customer pains and needs to see if we can ferret out why support would be valuable to a large number of companies.

Savio asserts that OSS products are of high quality and therefore customers have little incentive to buy support. There seem to be two underlying assumptions in that statement

• There aren’t enough bugs in open source to require support
• Customers wouldn’t want to pay the cost of open source support  

The first assumption – that open source is higher quality – is definitely true. When customers call us with support questions on open source packages it is very rarely about bugs in the open source code. Instead, about 90% of the time they call with configuration issues, performance issues, integration issues, how to questions or bugs in their own custom code that they’ve written on top of the open source package. The bottom line – customers still have lots of support issues even if it’s not about bugs in the open source code. (I’ll save for another post the idea that support takes on a whole new flavor in the open source world.)

“So I get it”, you say, “customers have some issues in using open source. But that doesn’t mean that they are willing to buy support.” That leads use to a final question – is the cost of open source support worth it for customers?. Savio refers to the fact that we’ve trained customers to spend 15% of product cost on support (in my experience, it’s more like 18-22%). I would say this another way – we’ve trained customers to place a certain value on support. If a customer could spend the same or less to get support on an open source package, would they buy support? The answer that we’ve seen is emphatically yes. For high quality support at the right price, customers will buy. They will buy because they want help when their production systems go down. They will buy because they want help troubleshooting problems. They will buy because they need expert advice. They will buy because they need help. Every survey I’ve seen shows that enterprises continually name quality support as one of the top few concerns around using more open source software.

Now we’ve come back full circle – if customers will buy high quality support at the right price, is there a viable business model that will support small and large companies and encourage venture investment. Again, our experience is resoundingly yes. You need to let go of many of the old high cost, proprietary approaches of enterprise software companies. You need to realize that support for open source is now a competitive marketplace. Once you do that, you will start to open your eyes to the many opportunities for open source business models to flourish.