Selling freedom, not free

As the open source business ecosystem grows and matures, I'm finding it increasingly important for me to not only pitch my company's paid version, but also others'. Were I true Adam Smith, I'd argue that

...every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.

But I'm not. I'm with John Nash: I'm best served by helping myself AND my community. Smith would argue that my goal is to induce those around me, out of their own enlightened self-interest (he calls it "self love"), to serve my needs because it also serves theirs. I don't disagree.

But I think there's a higher good, and one that best serves my community and myself in the short term. And that is, again, by actively trying to build up my community.

So, back to open source. When I first started at Alfresco, my goal was eradicate barriers to selling as much of our products as possible. This often meant promoting Alfresco with the free, unpaid versions of the default components that go into our ECM solution, namely: MySQL and JBoss (or Tomcat). It wasn't that I didn't want to help these other companies, but rather that my self-confidence in being able to sell Alfresco wasn't strong enough to also take on the sales task of promoting these others.

A few months later, Alfresco is kicking tail (we have a customer and active pilot list that any company, open source or proprietary, would covet). I'm happy about this, of course, but I'm increasingly mindful that some of this success has come at the expense of the long-term viability of the open source ecosystem. The more I perpetrate the myth that open source is free (not ours, but others') the more I limit Alfresco's long-term market potential.

Should I be promoting MySQL 5.0 Pro over Community Edition? Absolutely. Do I need to promote it at the expense of an Alfresco sale? No. But I think I (and, frankly, we) can be doing a lot more to foster an extra-Alfresco understanding of why paid-for open source is a better investment than "in the wild" open source, at least where there is the option of commercial support.

As for systems integrators, they also shoot themselves in the foot when they quickly abandon a commercial product for a free open source project at the slightest sign of customer push-back. "The customer is always right" (a sentiment I believe) should not be an excuse for poor salesmanship. If our sales pitch is only successful when we're pitching "free" as in gratis, we're not worth our commission.