Benefits of co-existing open source & commercial software
Commercial & OSS strengthen each other
Irrespective of the license chosen both individual developers and system designers and the overall community can derive significant benefit from the presence of the commercial offering and vice versa.
Take, for example, the issue of software bugs, a perennial challenge for a constantly evolving software product. Qt has hundreds of employees working on identifying existing or potential bugs and then creating fixes and patches that resolve those problems.
These individuals aren’t necessarily more skilled than their fellow developers in the Qt community, but they are people who are employed for their Qt expertise, who devote almost all of their time to testing and using the platform, and who are paid by the results they achieve. Yet the fixes and patches they develop are available, for free, to the Qt Project to use.
Throughout the Qt community there are hundreds of thousands of users and thousands of active contributors using the latest Qt versions in their configurations to build their applications. These individuals help improve Qt quality by reporting the problems they find. Many contribute fixes that enrich the Qt Project. With open governance, many new features find their way directly to Qt from open source communities and businesses.
Then there is the critical issue of support. Users of open source versions of a product have to pay extra for support during development and/or product lifetime. A company, such as Digia, that derives revenue from and invests in supporting commercial license customers can make available a similar level of service via consultancy to companies that have chosen to pursue the open source path. The aim is to ensure that customers are successful, regardless of the license they choose.
Conclusion
It is clear from the example of Qt that where commercial and open source software options successfully co-exist, the overall community can reap significant benefits, in terms of both platform evolution and access to support that will speed and simplify application development.
And, for an organization offering commercial licenses, being an active member of a community makes sound business sense – not only through the ‘built-in’ audience for its products and services but also through shared experiences and contributions from fellow members that ultimately enhance the products and services it offers its commercial customers.
Tuukka Turunen is director of R&D at Digia Qt, and Mirko Boehm is Economic Advisor and Past President of the KDE e.V free software community.
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