01 Commercialization is one of the important dimensions to measure the success of open source projects
The rise of open source software commercialization companies in China and capital’s continued focus on open source are breaking people’s traditional impression of “mutually exclusive” open source and commercialization, revealing the true nature of the relationship between the two.. That is, open source and commercialization can promote each other, integrate with each other, and develop collaboratively
Figure 1: Collaborative development of open source and commercialization
First of all, open source provides an innovative development model for commercialization. Open source is an efficient software development model. The open source community with open source projects as the core builds an open innovation ecosystem through the participation of many developers, which can accelerate the innovation of technology, products and services. , has great strategic significance for commercialization, which is evident from Red Hat's dominance in open source and its commercial success.
Secondly, commercialization is also of great significance to the development of the open source community. Commercialization is not only an important measure of the success of an open source project, but can also feed back and promote the sustainable development of the open source community.
At present, the health of the open source community is mostly presented through indicators such as the number of Pull requests, the number of Commits, the number of Issue submissions and comments, the number of Stars and Forks, and the number of Contributors. However, these indicators are not enough to accurately define the success of community development. Judging from the development rules of open source communities, open source communities that are commercially successful must be highly mature, have strong vitality, and have a large number of corporate users participating in long-term contributions. Therefore, commercialization can be used as a very intuitive indicator of the success of an open source community.
Commercialization itself can also accelerate the maturity of the open source community. On the one hand, for the daily operations of the open source community, commercialization can support the maintenance and operation of the open source community, cover the costs of developer members, technical facilities, training, etc., and achieve sustainable development of the community. On the other hand, commercialization can enable the open source community to gain broad market recognition and feed back the large-scale development of the open source community. Well-known developer and entrepreneur Peter Levine once said: "The history of open source emphasizes that the success of open source comes from a virtuous cycle of technical and business innovation... Only when open source technical innovation and business innovation are combined, the full potential of open source can be achieved be released."
Finally, the integration of open source and commercialization is expected to bring a free and fair living environment for developers. The open source community entrusts the ultimate ideal of independent developers, that is, each software developer can be independent from the organization and obtain rewards through free creation and innovation, and the integration of open source and commercialization is The best way to achieve this ideal.
02 Open source commercialization faces many challenges
Although open source and commercialization can theoretically empower each other, looking at the history of global open source, there are still very few projects that started with open source and ultimately achieved great success in commercialization, and the domestic market is still exploring effective open source commercialization paths.
Currently, the main challenges faced by open source commercialization are: on the one hand, the open source community itself lacks commercial orientation, which is specifically reflected in how to build an active open source community, how to determine the business model, and how to determine the target customer group; on the other hand, In the process of commercial operations, commercial companies will encounter various obstacles, such as how to maintain the vitality and leadership of the open source community for a long time, how to deal with fierce market competition, and how to find winning commercial scenarios.
Figure 2: The open source community lacks commercial orientation as it moves towards commercialization.
Figure 3: Obstacles that will be encountered in the process of commercialization
However, we have seen that there are already a number of successful open source commercialization cases in the world, such as Red Hat, MongoDB, Databricks, etc., all of which have achieved good commercial achievements based on open source. At the same time, the open source community is also maintaining a vigorous development. These excellent successful cases not only provide rich reference experience for domestic open source commercialization companies to solve the above problems, but also provide practical open source commercialization paths.
In the wave of open source in China, the database market is a representative field where many open source commercial manufacturers have emerged. Among them, Jingzhou Technology is a typical open source commercial database manufacturer. As a newly emerging commercial company in the past two years, Jingzhou Technology has gained widespread market recognition with StarRocks and accumulated a large number of commercialization cases. Its development history and development model are very representative. Recently, iAnalysis had an in-depth exchange with Sun Wenxian, CEO of Jingzhou Technology, and conducted an in-depth discussion on Jingzhou Technology’s open source commercialization ideas and key success factors.
03 Jingzhou Technology’s open source commercialization path: “One core” + “Two-wheel drive”
Beijing Jingzhou Technology Co., Ltd. (referred to as "Jingzhou Technology") was established in March 2022. In September of the same year, it released a commercial version of the Jingzhou database based on StarRocks. In just one year, the number of paying customers of Jingzhou Database has exceeded 70, covering many industries such as finance, retail, manufacturing, logistics, e-commerce, games, and automobile travel.
At the same time, after StarRocks became a Linux Foundation project, Jingzhou Technology, as one of the main contributors to the community, is committed to improving the international competitiveness of StarRocks and strengthening ecological cooperation with other open source projects and upstream and downstream manufacturers.
Community and commercialization go hand in hand and promote each other, forming a closed loop of development
The acceleration of the commercialization of Jingzhou Technology is a natural result of its founding team gradually implementing the commercialization path plan.
Specifically, Jingzhou Technology first deeply participated in the operation of the open source community with the industry's top users as the core, built the community with many participants, and promoted the rapid maturity of the community. The innovative ecosystem of a mature community can efficiently achieve product stability and product leadership, and continue to generate winning scenarios.
Based on the stable products and winning scenarios disclosed by the community, Jingzhou Technology has reached cooperation with users who have enterprise version requirements, established business contracts, and obtained benefits by completing the contracts.
In the process of business operations, in addition to feeding back community operations, Jingzhou Technology will also continue to contribute to the community the leading functional codes that drive iteration in business scenarios to maintain the leadership of community products and technologies.
In the end, community operations and commercial operations promote each other and continue a positive cycle.
In the above commercialization route vision, there are two core strategies that are very critical: "one core" and "two drivers". "One core" means that whether you are deeply involved in the operation of open source communities or the operations of commercial companies, they all take the industry's leading customers as the core to drive user expansion and user services; "two drivers" refer to participation in the operation of open source communities and the operation of commercial companies. Commercial operations need to go hand in hand and promote each other.
To implement the above commercialization route, we need to work together from the four main lines of open source community operations, product strength, market strategy and organizational support.
Figure 4: Jingzhou open source commercialization path: one core + two drivers schematic diagram
Open source community operation: Adhere to the operation idea with the industry’s top users as the core
Operating the StarRocks community well is a prerequisite for commercialization. This is also a strategic choice made by its founding team after comprehensive consideration of the commercialization path and market trends.
Figure 5: Running the StarRocks open source community well is a prerequisite for commercialization
On the one hand, open source can accelerate commercial success. Sun Wenxian believes that two conditions are needed to realize to B commercialization: First, provide enterprise-level stable products. Second, determine the winning scenario for the product. Under the traditional commercialization approach, product testing requires a lot of manpower and material resources, and winning scenarios need to rely on local promotion, sales and other means to cover many corporate customers to be clear.
The open source community provides an innovative idea. The open source community itself is a technology innovation ecosystem. Many participants test and optimize project codes out of interest to promote the rapid stability of projects. In particular, the project usage experience of enterprise users can help projects expand application scenarios and clarify winning scenarios. The open source community efficiently achieves product stability, discovers winning scenarios, and accelerates the commercialization process under the principle of open sharing.
On the other hand, open source represents the future trend of software procurement. The market is increasingly applying open source software. Take the financial industry as an example. In order to achieve independence and controllability, the financial industry requires manufacturers to submit independent property source code. International Internet giants such as AWS and Microsoft Technology manufacturers represented by Huawei are also following this requirement. Open source code itself has become a very important symbol for financial companies to evaluate the autonomy and controllability of their systems. The most extreme way to open source code is for the software itself to be open source. Therefore, establishing an open source community has become a forward-looking measure that adapts to the trend of the software market.
With the collaborative efforts of the Jingzhou team and community users, the StarRocks project has achieved rapid iteration. In 2022 alone, 60 versions have been released, with more than 1.5 million lines of code modified. At the same time, the use experience of leading companies in the industry has also helped Jingzhou clarify Winning scenarios, such as BI self-service analysis, user profiling, real-time risk control, real-time decision-making, etc.
There are many types of users in the open source community. Why does Jingzhou Technology adhere to the operation idea of focusing on industry leading users?
Jingzhou Technology believes that an important indicator to evaluate whether an open source community can survive and has tenacious vitality is the maturity of the community, and the key factor driving the maturity of the community is the number of top users in the industry. The participation of leading users in the industry not only brings more Contributors and Committers, but also means that leading users are applying open source projects to the most challenging core business scenarios in the industry, and It is hoped that there will be source code level control over the project, and the contributions of top users to the project will speed up project iterations.
The participation of top Internet users in the StarRocks community is very high. Most of the contributors come from Alibaba Cloud, Tencent, JD.com, Didi, Meituan, etc. In particular, Alibaba Cloud personnel account for 20% of the total contributors, and Tencent personnel account for 20% of the total number of contributors. than 15%.
The high level of participation of industry leading users can not only accelerate the maturity of the community, but also provide sufficient conditions for the incubation of commercial customers. Many of the early paying users of Jingzhou Technology overlap with StarRocks community users.
Product Power: Integrating community and commercialization to create continuously iterative product power
Continuously iterative product strength is the core competitive advantage of Jingzhou Technology. The product development idea that integrates community progress and commercial operation is the key to the continuous iteration of its products. Specifically, it includes two key factors: 1) Work with other community partners to create product development ideas and speed up the iteration of open source products; 2) Refine product functions, incorporate open source version contributions into the release logic, and work together to polish the product. The version tends to be stable.
Figure 6: Schematic diagram of the formation path of Jingzhou Technology’s product strength
Jingzhou Technology plans and updates its product route every year, and the product planning goals are also used as value keywords for that year. For example, the value keywords of the 2.0 version of the Mirror Boat Database in 2022 are "extreme speed" and "unification". Under the big goal of "extreme speed and unity", Jingzhou Technology focuses on two things: vectorization and CBO. In 2023, Jingzhou Database 3.2 version emphasizes the two concepts of "cloud native" and "lake warehouse", and focuses on the development of three major features: storage and calculation separation, materialized view and multi-warehouse. These three major features will help Jingzhou Database take a big step towards cloud native and lake warehouse.
After surveying and analyzing the needs of large users in the community, the product planning goals were determined. When refining specific product features, Jingzhou Technology targeted the large business scenarios, large operations and large data volumes of leading Internet companies from the beginning. Frequent interactions quickly identify problems and iterate versions to stabilize them.
Taking the 3.2 version of Jingzhou Database as an example, after determining the development of major features such as storage and calculation separation, lake warehouse analysis, and materialized views, Jingzhou Technology took 1 to 2 months to release the first version internally, and then made the initial version available Used by leading Internet users in the community who have previously researched needs, such as Tencent, Didi, Alibaba Cloud, Ctrip, Xiaohongshu, Mango TV, etc. Its complex product lines, rich business scenarios, and large fluctuations in data levels enable Internet users to quickly discover problems and provide feedback in practice. After the problem is discovered, Internet companies provide contributions or Jingzhou Technology fixes the bug internally. Repeat this process multiple times until the version becomes stable.
Sun Wenxian said that with the increase in the number of top Internet users, the cycle for product versions to stabilize is gradually shortening. In 2022, the cycle for mirror boat products to stabilize will be 6 months. In 2023, this cycle will be reduced to 4 months.
The product development idea of integrating community progress and commercial operation has allowed StarRocks to gradually win the reputation of users in just three years. One user once publicly stated: "StarRocks is the de facto standard in the OLAP field", and its product functions and performance have widely become What competitors are benchmarking against.
Market strategy: Under the open core development model, complete the final step of commercialization by concluding a contract
The target customer group positioning of Jingzhou Technology's commercialization is consistent with the StarRocks community, focusing on the Top 30 enterprise users in the Internet, finance, new retail, manufacturing and other industries.
The different purchasing methods of enterprises for open source software and services have promoted the commercialization of open source and evolved different business models. One purchasing scenario is that enterprises tend to purchase enterprise versions, which drives the evolution of business models represented by open core. Another situation is that Party A prefers to purchase services from the original company to ensure the supply chain security of open source software. This evolved into the professional services business model represented by Red Hat.
Jingzhou Technology chose the former among the above two business models. In the view of Jingzhou Technology, the first model focuses on products and maintains continuous iteration of products, which is conducive to Jingzhou Technology maintaining its leading product strength.
In terms of the choice of open source commercialization model, Jingzhou Technology has chosen the Open Core model from the beginning, and gained revenue by providing enterprise versions for B-side customers. Jingzhou Technology is very confident in this model, believing that this model can solve the "conflict" between Party A's enterprises and closed-source products, and can also benefit the business through continuous iteration of product capabilities. The company injects strong vitality.
Based on more than 20 years of experience in the industry, Sun Wenxian concluded that in the past, in the process of serving Party A's enterprises, closed source software products often established "technical walls" by creating unique data formats or syntaxes in order to consolidate and expand their sphere of influence. ” to achieve the purpose of exclusivity. In order to avoid being strongly tied to a certain closed-source software, Party A's company has been working hard to tear down the "technical wall". The most effective way for enterprises to deal with this problem is to use open source products. Since core business scenarios have extremely high requirements for product reliability, stability, and security, choosing enterprise software products or services that can cover open source is becoming a new habit for enterprise software procurement.
On the basis of providing standard and trustworthy enterprise products, we complete the last mile of commercialization by concluding business contracts with customers.
Sun Wenxian believes that “commercialization itself represents the spirit of contract.”According to Jingzhou Technology’s customer experience, once an enterprise applies StarRocks to core innovative business scenarios, , in order to avoid encountering technical obstacles in complex environments and delaying business advancement, companies will soon begin to seek payment and ensure the smooth implementation of business scenarios through cooperation with commercial companies. At the same time, commercial companies need to assume corresponding legal responsibilities during cooperation to ensure the company's needs for safety, performance, stability, etc.
It needs to be emphasized that behind the establishment of a business contract is the rational choice of partners by corporate customers, which also represents a market test for commercial companies. On the one hand, enterprise decision-making itself is a process involving multiple roles, including a series of demonstrations and verifications, with a very high degree of rationality; on the other hand, enterprises’ requirements for manufacturers involve many aspects, including products. Functions, company operating conditions and development plans, company service capabilities, product prices, etc. are used to consider the manufacturer's qualifications and the risks of cooperation with the manufacturer.
When talking about how to face the vicious competition of low-price dumping in the market, Sun Wenxian said that although the market competition is fierce and there are many business cases with zero-yuan winning bids, highly rational companies will also carefully consider low-price competition. In the end, Accept low prices within a reasonable price range rather than pursuing low prices excessively. He emphasized that price itself constitutes a competitive factor, but it is not the core competitive factor. The core factor of business competition is the continuous iteration of product power. Therefore, Jingzhou Technology is optimistic about future competition and believes that as long as it always maintains leadership in products, technology and community, it will eventually achieve commercial success.
Organizational support: Provide organizational guarantees for community and commercial development respectively
The StarRocks community provides a source of vitality for commercial entities such as Jingzhou, Alibaba Cloud, and Tencent. The technological leadership of the community is the key to maintaining the vitality of the water source. While Jingzhou is pursuing commercial success, it is also continuing to invest in maintaining the technological leadership of the StarRocks community. For example, in terms of human support, Jingzhou Technology not only has a dedicated business team to ensure business expansion, but also has a professional community operation team to maintain community development. .
04 Open source commercialization will change the competitive landscape of the software market
Driven by the open source market and investment in both directions, China's open source commercialization exploration will continue to accelerate and usher in a broader development space.
On the one hand, the rapid development of China's open source market will spawn more open source commercial companies and accelerate the verification of open source commercial models. On the other hand, in the past two years, the number of unicorn companies has been gradually decreasing, and their valuations have also shrunk to varying degrees, which has caused a change in market investment trends. The focus of investment institutions is shifting from "unicorn" companies to "unicorn tiger" companies that have newly entered the market. This type of enterprise "occupies a mountain as a tiger" and can lead the industry in niche areas. This change will benefit open source commercialization companies in their early stages and will provide them with a relaxed financing environment.
In the future, driven by the rapid and continuous innovation of the open source community, open source commercialization will rise with strength and become a competitive force that cannot be underestimated in the Internet ecological competition.