Searching for Intellectual Property

We're on yet another Intellectual Property search mission. This princess bride is pursued through the dread pirate "Open Source," mysterious and fell. How can you make money with Open Source? How can you create IP with Open Source? How to make and keep a hoard for your VC horde?

One avenue to Open Source profitability is symbiosis. For example, Red Hat recognized Linux had not been "socialized." You could get Linux for free, but since there was no support for it, using it required a "kernel hacker" skill set beyond most administrator's capability. Red Hat created installation tools like RPM and documentation so could be used. More recently, Mark Shuttleworth noticed Debian was high quality, but hard to use. He created Ubuntu, a socialized debian, which has been at the top of http://distrowatch.com/ for a very long time.

Groundwork did the same thing with Nagios by adding integration software, documentation, installation and support, and warranties so customers who are not early technology adopters can engage Open Source monitoring. This has been successful to the point of encroaching on the enterprise territory of the Big Iron monitoring tools like OpenView.

Still, there is worry here about whether we have IP, or if other people think we have IP, or where is the IP and so on. In the main, IP resides in the people who create IP. That's why it's called "intellectual." But there is a problem. Technical IP lasts for a very short time. IP no longer makes sense in static books or grand but dead document systems. And, IP is only useful in relationship to customers.

You can certainly use copyright laws to protect stuff you write. The problem is the technical data you write is in a static document with a shelf life of a few months at best. IP is only interesting in a live relationship to the technology and the people working with the technology. This is why Wiki is important. That's why forums are important. Technical people won't use books more than 2 years old, and often less. IP won't sit still. You need people for this. This is a permanent situation. The people have to provide updated to keep up with the changes. It's time to "think differently" about IP. You need blogs and Wikis and forums maintained daily by not only the companies engineers but, as importantly, the customers who are on the front line for IP. Technical IP is a relationship, not some static "thing."

Another problem is customers don't want to contribute code where they have to sign over IP. If they are interested in Open Source, they want their contribution to be Open Source. Soliciting for code that will not be GPL means you pretty much won't get any code. It's the openness of the source that attracts community.

So where can you "hoard?" I think you make money providing solutions. Solutions are not one thing and they are not static. You provide a solution to a customer's user story. Even if the solution is perfect, within months, the customer environment has moved on. Customers come back to you because your solution is dynamic and your smart people taken in the customer stories and moved the solution ahead to keep up with the changes. That's value worth paying for.