Open Source Blog

The situation is not always that clear cut, however. There remain plenty of open source entrepreneurs for whom developing a commercial business behind their project is the last thing on their mind.

Take Linus Torvalds, for example. While the likes of Red Hat set about making money from Linux, its creator has been happy enough to take the plaudits and accept (probably very well paid, let's be fair) jobs at Transmeta and the OSDL.

Another open source developer apparently happy to shun the commercialisation of open source is Ethan Galstad, founder of the Nagios host and service monitor project.

Galstad recently posted an interesting response to the assertion of Dave Rosenberg of the OSDL that joining up with a commercial entity would make the Nagios project better and enable Galstad to focus on the project.

"Its true that joining with a company to commercialise Nagios *could* be beneficial to future development, but I'd be willing to bet that in 99% of all such scenarios there would be more problems than anything created by such a move," he wrote.

"The ideals of OSS are about openness and freedom - stuff for the greater good. How can corporate interests reasonably nurture such ideals? How can you be assured that the corporation won't be pressured by its board of directors and/or investors to change the way things are done and subvert the greater good that the OSS project originally served?" he added.

From these comments it would be easy to assume that Galstad was part of the 'old breed' of open source developers - the bearded, sandal-wearing type. Not necessarily true (I can't pretend to have any knowledge of Galstad's facial hair/footwear preferences), and it's interesting to note that what Galstad is attempting to achieve with Nagios is a different business model, rather than a rejection of commercialisation per se.

"Don't get me wrong - I do believe that OSS projects need financial backing to succeed in the long term. However, you don't need to commercialise your OSS project or adopt one of the popular Open Source business models to succeed in generating funding," he writes. "I'm talking about generating enough income to sustain the OSS project and its ideals, so that it can continue to flourish, unencumbered from potential conflicts of interest."

Galstad is doing in this in two ways: by partnering (and here) with commercial entities such as data centre monitoring software vendor Splunk and operations management vendor Groundwork and through his other business, open source support promotion company Ayamon and its www.findopensourcesupport.com website.