







On the heels of my talk about the current licensing challenges to single-vendor open source firms, I want to discuss the resulting strategy for vendors selling to developers. Single-vendor open sou…
Single-Vendor Open Source Firms (and Their Intellectual Property Strategies)
Dirk Riehle, dirk@riehle.org An edited version was published in Computer magazine, April 2020 Abstract This article present a particular business model for commercial open source firms, called the …

The intellectual property rights imperative of single-vendor open source
I guess everybody knows it but nobody ever named it, as far as I know, so I’m doing it here: The Intellectual Property Rights Imperative of Single-Vendor Commercial Open Source Always act in …

Please Help Keep our Language Precise: Single-Vendor Open Source is Neo-Proprietary Source, not Closed Source
When the Open Source Initiative defined open source, it focused only on the license, and ignored the process. Smart entrepreneurs quickly discovered that they could provide to the world their produ…

Reimagining OSS Licensing and Commercialization with Fair Source - Adam Jacob, System Initiative
Why Now? And Who? The Struggle Over Single-Vendor / Open-Core Licensing
Update 2023-08-26: Redis writes to us that they rebranded from Redis Labs, to Redis. In yesterday’s talk I reviewed the current licensing struggle of single-vendor open source firms. Single-v…

The Single-Vendor Commercial Open Source Business Model
Dirk Riehle Research, SAP Labs LLC Updated 2010-11-09: Renamed “commercial open source” to “single-vendor (commercial) open source” to be clear about the difference to distr…

The Great Open Source Debate: 4 Things to Consider
Build, deploy and manage your applications on any cloud or your own servers.

The Open Source Distributor Business Model
Dirk Riehle, dirk@riehle.org, Published in Computer vol. 54, no. 12 (December 2021), pp. 99-103. Abstract This article defines and discusses one particular commercial open source business model, ca…

The Great Open Source Shake-up
The past year and a half has seen a number of open source and open source-ish companies like Elastic, Confluent, and MongoDB change licenses on certain products, moving away from traditional open s…

Some startups are going ‘fair source’ to avoid the pitfalls of open source licensing | TechCrunch
New alternative category to 'closed source' could help companies monetize software in the open -- without going all-in on open source.

Everything an open source maintainer might need to know about open source licensing | Ben Balter
There's lots of internet lore around open source licensing. An attorney and open source developer answers the most common questions.


Open sourcing our server
We take the final step in our open source journey. Our clients had always been open source. Today, we are also releasing the source code for our servers.


Solving the Commercial Open Source Licensing Dilemma With Triple-Licensing
As you may have noticed, the move away from approved open source licenses to commercial almost-like-open-source licenses by single-vendor-owned open source projects has created a lot of bad press f…

Parting Clouds: Creating a Competitive Marketplace for Compute | Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project
The Canadian market for cloud computing is monopolized. In a new report, CAMP argues that the most effective response is to unleash competition through procurement, regulation, and competition law enforcement.
