The Commercial Open Source Software (COSS) business model continues to build traction in the market with companies like Databricks, Elastic and Github leading the way.

The open source community is very important for your overall success, but it’s important to understand the value of the community in the commercial context.

The persona is usually developers, who are very tech savvy and looking to build something. This community can be a tremendous advocate for the technology as well as be contributors to the open source software.

That said, they are rarely the buyers, or decision makers for commercial transactions. Here’s some data points not only from my experience but also from open source and commercial leaders I’ve worked with:

• The developer is not the buyer. Given today’s economy where outcome and value are key critical to sell; it’s imperative to talk to the economic decision maker as well as develop champions and influences in the org.
• To find a sales lead (this is not a “qualified opportunity”), it takes 10x more names to find a sales qualified lead that targeting the companies you want to do business
• A key value of a company using OSS is that it is a signal of where the company is on the tech maturity curve and may be a target to go after with a commercial approach

In the future, I’ll dig deeper into the developer relations/OSS strategy as part of the overall business plan.