~kanarip

I'm on my way back home from Red Hat's EMEA Partner Summit in Malta, the second annual partner summit in EMEA, while I'm writing this.

I was here on behalf of the Fedora Project, to give a session on capitalizing communities, essentially saying you can most efficiently add value to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the rest of the Red Hat partner eco-system by engaging and participating in the world of Free Software through Fedora.

My session was planned on Tuesday and since the Summit had started on Sunday, I had already met a lot of people from ISVs, System Integrators, suppliers and consultancy companies.

Now, I have a bunch of business cards from people that I'm going to follow-up with after I come home, having lined up maybe a few weeks worth of work to get their software into Fedora or EPEL, following up on details with others, and to investigate and research some of the products I've learned about, such as a 10, 40 or 100 GBit/s switch from Arista supposedly running an operating system based on Fedora (I did not yet get in touch with their developers but I'm working on it).

There's one ISV in particular that I want to highlight;

Bacula Systems

If you know Bacula, the name of this company may have already given away their line of business; the Free Software Bacula backup suite. Their CEO, Jack Griffin, was in my session and hooked up with me afterwards and so I got to hear their story and answer some questions on how a community works and why a community works the way that it does and how to, and how *not* to capitalize a piece of Free Software like Bacula.

He told me that they had been very careful not to go down the same road other companies had done;

Most companies capitalize on a piece of Free Software by adding some functionality on top of it, selling Licenses for what they would then call the "Enterprise Edition" or something along those lines. Most times, these developed features do not end up in the right place, upstream, and though they may be available as actual code, you can't use the product without purchasing a License. This is obviously not the right way of doing it, since it puts the product somewhere in between a true Free Software product, and a completely proprietary product. It's not the most efficient business model either, since you might end up inventing features that somewhere down the road are superseeded by the features in the truely Free Software version as well -duplication of work-, and you don't get the benefit of potentially a few million pair of eye-balls going over your features before they're even in the product you're trying to sell and potentially further improving them.

Bacula Systems on the other hand takes Bacula, removes the things they cannot support in the long-term, are -right then- infeasible or are otherwise not (yet) sustainable for the Enterprise, add all the value that Enterprises require such as long-term support, and then sell subscriptions. Obviously, while doing so, they actively participate in the development of Free Software Bacula so that down the road the next generation of Bacula is going to be an ever better product for their customers. Also, and this is majorly significant to the model, their supported version (or Enterprise Edition if you will) remains to be truly Free Software. This way, they ensure development and maintenance are cost efficient, truly honest and honorable wrt. the work done by the larger Free Software community, showing excellent Free Software citizenship. They've hired Kern Sibbald (and here's a nice interview from two years ago), father of the original Bacula project, as their CTO. He was also the one who suggested to keep the business honest, transparent and open. To further appreciate the way that Bacula Systems operates, let me tell you that they've assigned copyright on Bacula to the Free Software Foundation Europe.

Overall the story of Bacula Systems is pretty impressive (and so is their list of customer references), and I have to give them a huge compliment on having become the very best ISV I have seen so far, doing what they do so very well, knowing where they come from and keeping true to their roots as well as the morals and principles of Free Software. I wish them the very best in their business and I'm going to actively assist them in getting the job done.