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Big in Japan Source Code Release

January 29, 2007

Last year I got a wild hair and decided that Big in Japan should release its RSS tools using an open source license.  The move was the right decision and lots of folks have taken us up on our offer and repurposed the code.  Literally almost a hundred thousand people have downloaded one or more of the tools.  Several people have launched versions of the tools and attempted to sell the running version on eBay (some through fraud).  It has been interesting to watch. 

Other people are taking our idea and running with it in their own business.  Today I was reading a post on the WebPl.US blog:

So the question is, where is the business model going, and how will it affect my business? Well the next major trend I think we’ll see is in the SaaS market moving to partial open source. Take a gander over at Biggu’s move to release the source code to a few of their tools. This was a smart move for three reasons: 1. They couldn’t keep up with the hackers trying to break their apps, so they let everyone else deal with it. 2. They weren’t making money from the apps they open sourced, so this lets them reallocate resources to revenue generating projects. 3. It was a major PR tool, it allowed their other revenue generating products (podcall, podserve, etc.) generate some good buzz and ultimately some more exposure.

Now its hard to extract a clearcut business model from Biggu’s move, but its sort of what I’m about to get to. My suggestion for what could be a very successful SaaS move would be to open source the entry level version of your app. Give it away, free! But do that instead of offering a free for life account on your system. Let the community who was less likely to pay for your product or might have had their concerns about offloading their data to another host run it locally. Just give away a stripped down version of your product. This gives developers and end users a taste of what there is. Then turn around and sell/lease/rent your pro versions with more features. The users will see the missing features and flock to this paid model. The SaaS model itself has already been proven, as it gives end users a cheaper way to get into the software versus the high up front costs of a traditional software model, and people are more likely to try the software and keep it if its easy to get into.

It will be interesting to see what the web application landscape will look like in the next ten years.  Will open source rein supreme? 

Written by Alexander Muse · Filed Under Blog 

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  1. Brian Breslin Says:
    January 29th, 2007 at 11:49 pm

    Hey Alex,
    Thanks for the mention, I’m glad you found my new blog. Any time you want to talk about business, shoot me an email or a call. I think open source might be less of a selling point ten years from now. As iterations and release schedules get shorter and shorter, its going to change how they think about old versions of their code.

  2. David Cancel Says:
    January 31st, 2007 at 4:54 pm

    FYI, your release of elfurl contains no migrations or SQL file, so obiviously it can’t run.

    Thanks for releasing your projects, very cool.

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