Some call it Commercial Open Source. Others Professional Open Source. Whichever way you call it, it’s all about leveraging an Open Source software development process for the benefits of a for-profit business and the customers it serves. But because Open Source shares roots with the Free Software movement, defining commonly-acceptable terms for Commercial Open Source has proven to be a challenge. Philosophical pursuits get in the way of business, and lack of proper due diligence can lead even the most respectable players in the field to fall into the trap of disinformation. The question of what makes an acceptable use of the term Open Source for a capitalistic venture is not new, but it has become a fairly complex one over time, as best illustrated in this well-researched article from David Berlind. Following Intalio’s recent announcements related to Open Source, some questions have been raised regarding the legitimacy of our claims. Here is an attempt at giving an answer and moving the discussion forward.

First, a little bit of history. Intalio was started in 1999 as a pure Open Source venture. 100% of the code we produced was licensed under an Apache-like license, which is as liberal as it gets beyond public domain. We developed projects such as OpenEJB — which became part of Apache Geronimo, OpenJMS, OpenORB, Castor, Tyrex, and OpenXML, which was merged with IBM’s XML4J to serve as a foundation for Apache Xerces. We then built the first-generation of our standards-based Business Process Management System (Intalio|n³) on top of some of these Open Source components, using a traditional, closed-source licensing model. Eventually, we decided to come back to an Open Source model for our core product, and made an acquisition back in December 2005 in order to accelerate our transition from one standard process execution language (BPML) to another (BPEL). We announced our new Open Source strategy back then, and made a first release of our second-generation product in February 2006.

For many reasons, we decided to make this transition to Open Source a process, rather than a singular event. First, we had to get rid of third-party components that we had used to build our product, and that were not available under an Open Source license, such as the library we used to draw BPMN diagrams. Second, we wanted to leverage existing Open Source communities, such as the Eclipse Foundation or the Apache Software Foundation, rather than building a new community from scratch, therefore had to follow their own processes, like the Apache Incubator process. Third, having been in the Open Source game for over six years, we knew very well that we would have to use a mix of layering and dual licensing to make our business sustainable, and we did not want to mislead our contributors, customers, and partners by going 100% Open Source initially, then adding non Open Source components to our business over time. Trust matters if you want your business to last.

So let’s take a look at our track record: First, we donated our BPEL engine to Apache back in February, making it the core codebase for the Apache Ode project. Second, we donated our BPMN modeler to Eclipse. Third, we released our workflow framework under the Eclipse Public License, and made it available at tempo.intalio.org. Fourth, we announced that we will release our entire BPMS under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) amended with an attribution clause. This full Open Source release will be made available at intalio.org sometime during the current quarter, and we hope that reasonable attribution terms will be approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) by then.

When we make this release, two editions of our product will be made available: Intalio|BPMS Community Edition and Intalio|BPMS Enterprise Edition. The Community Edition will be available under the terms of an amended MPL, but we will not provide any technical support for it. The Enterprise Edition will be available under a traditional end user licensing agreement, and we will provide technical support for it through yearly subscription contracts, giving customers access to patch updates and some additional features, following the exact same model as JBoss for the JBoss Operations Network. The Community Edition will share approximately 95% of the code found in the Enterprise Edition, and we expect this ratio to remain constant over time. This is our commitment to an Open Source model that we believe will benefit our customers, our investors, and the community at large.

That being said, there is a lot more to Commercial Open Source than just licensing terms. To me, the implications of an Open Source business model are a lot more significant when considering the inverted sales process it can support. The enterprise software industry needs to be reformed in many ways, and providing source code under an Open Source license is only a small part of the changes that are required. Allowing enterprise customers to adopt radically new technologies while lowering all barriers to adoption is what CIOs should be looking for, and the inverted sales process pioneered by earlier commercial Open Source players — il faut rendre à César ce qui appartient à César — is what it’s all about.

To conclude, if the simple idea of having a complete BPMS available under an Open Source license is appealing to you, I invite you to contribute to Intalio’s various Open Source projects. You might find that adding a BPMN modeler to your BPM product would offer some benefits to your customers. You might also realize that supporting BPEL will be a good thing moving forward. Or you might want to reuse some pieces of our BPEL4People workflow framework. In all cases, the Open Source licenses we used for these different projects will allow you to do so without having to buy a license from us, which is nice in and by itself. And if you find some pieces missing, join us and let’s build them together.

“It’s always more fun to share with everyone.”
-Jack Johnson

Reference: Intalio’s Contributions to Open Source