Some enterprise open-core commercial products don't even offer source code access. This obviously limits freedom of future action versus using the open source community edition. Other open-core commercial products do provide source code access, but only as long as your subscription license is current. As such, it's important to understand how easily your company can shift from using the enterprise commercial open-core product to using the open source community edition. You'll need to figure out if the enterprise features are really product extensions or if they are integral to your usage.
Gartner analyst Brian Prentice has argued that customers will eventually need to evaluate and price the enterprise commercial version of an open-core product. This is all the more true if there isn't a clear distinction between which kinds of features fall into the open source community edition versus the enterprise open-core commercial product.
Customers using or considering an offering that falls into the "cloud delivery of open source" category need to keep in mind two elements of freedom of action. First, is it possible to run the product on another cloud infrastructure or within the customer's own data center? Second, and often more important, is the customer's data locked into the vendor's cloud offering?
While usage of open-source-licensed products is heading in one direction, it's important for decision makers to understand that "open source" is utilized in many shapes and forms. With no malice intended, your interpretation may not match your vendor's interpretation.
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This article, "'Open source' doesn't mean what it used to," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Rodrigues et al.'s Open Sources blog and follow the latest developments in open source and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.