Aligning with User + Customer Needs with Rod Johnson

This week on The Business of Open Source I had Rod Johnson, founder/CEO of Spring Source and creator of the Spring Framework (as well as board member of many other open source companies) on to talk about Spring, monetizing open source and what’s changed in the open source ecosystem since 2008.

Key takeaways:

• Consulting was burning the entire team out, and that threatened the health not just of the consulting business, but of the open source project as well
• An amazing salesperson can often sell anything, but that doesn’t mean that you’ll be able scale, because your entire sales team is not likely to be incredibly brilliant
• Spring Source ended up not monetizing Spring at all — but rather worked on monetizing with products that were complementary to Spring. “We monetized Spring by not monetizing Spring, by using it to open the door”
• The moment that the company really started to see success as a product company was when the team stopped thinking about what they wanted to build and instead focused on what customers where telling them that they wanted.
• The risk of having a bunch of very good engineers on your team is that they’re excited about solving hard technical problems — but your customers might want something that is not very technically challenging or interesting.
• A major part of the job of a company leader is to talk to your team and get them on board with your plans
• The environment around monetizing open source projects has changed — there are things that worked in 2008 that wouldn’t work today, and things that didn’t work then that would be fine now
• If you love (insert your favorite open source project here), it has to have a sustainable economic model
• It’s really critical to have a rationale behind what functionality goes in your product and what goes into your open source project

At the end we talked briefly about Open Source Founders Summit, a conference for leaders in open source businesses happening this May 27th and 28th in Paris.