I just read and summarized the conclusions from an interesting article about open source licenses and business models: Licensing and Business Models (Onetti, Verma, 2008)

The choice of an open source software license is typically made by the creator of a project, usually a software developer, without the business or legal skills needed to understand how the choice of license affects the choice of business model. Since the terms of a license determine what companies can do with their software, companies are implicitly narrowing the choice of business models when they select a license type. Business models are therefore often defined around the license and not the other way around.

The authors show with examples an interesting trend in companies changing from one license type to another, trying to adjust the license to the business model at a later stage.

Obviously not all open source companies can change the license as they might have given away the rights needed. Only the ones who own the IPR or the ones who are able to get assignation of rights from all contributors to the software, are entitled to change the license. The authors believe that there are plenty of open source companies for whom modifications of the license to fit another business model is not available, forcing them to adopt suboptimal business models.

The conclusions are very similar to the ones I have experienced within R&D and patenting where the inventor, usually a researcher in a narrow technical field, rarely has the skills to understand how the invention and patent will be used, and how do strategically design the patent application or keep parts of the invention secret to enable different business models.

It was an interesting article in a somewhat complex field of business models and business model innovation.

//Anders


Note to Alex:
It was not intuitively clear to me how to map this kind of business model parameters / design constraints using the business model canvas. I guess the developing community is considered to be part of the partner network and distribution, but I am not sure about the licenses?

As I see it, and I know we have different opinions here, the choice of license is part of the value proposition towards the development community - why should they co-develop the software with my company? why should they foster the commoditization of a given part of a software?

And the questions I use for value propositions towards developers are like the ones you use in your customer value proposition:
-which one of our developer's problems can we help to solve?
-which developer needs can we help satisfy?
-what are the bundles of assets and capabilities we can offer? (what tools, developers' kits and patches do they need?)

I know that you have been working with IT and value propositions in e-business so I understand that you have been thinking about these issues, perhaps you could help me understand how you reason?

Thanks,
Anders