“In this series of articles, we highlight two industry experts
who have differing views of what it means to be a commercial open
source business and how to be successful. Bernard Golden, CEO of
Navica, an open source consultancy, and Michael Grove, CEO of
OpenITWorks, which focuses on helping IT organizations collaborate,
are both recognized as industry experts and thought leaders.“In point-counterpoint style, Bernard discusses in Part 1 how
commercial open source is its own business model and is unique in
that it faces two ‘chasms’ (from Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the
Chasm), one involving broad adoption of the free versions of
product, and the other involving converting a significant subset of
adopters to paying customers…”