Introduction
The Open Source business model has traditionally been thought of as losing strategy, with the only commonly referred to success story being RedHat. The level of scrutiny has increased as Infrastructure as a Service (aka, IaaS or Cloud) providers, like AWS make billions of dollars by capturing the value that Open Source Software creates. These billions come predominantly from SaaS vendors (who in turn are making billions) benefiting from the reduced upfront capital expenses required to build their offerings on these IaaS providers. Common sense is that it is foolish to sell software any way other than SaaS.

While this perspective is not without merit, the reality is that there are many successful Open Source Software companies and the rate of success is growing. It seems that Open Source companies are figuring out how to capture a larger percentage of the value they create. As someone who previously co-founded a SaaS company and more recently co-founded an Open Source Software company, I wanted to explore SaaS vs Open Source from a go-to-market perspective to illustrate how the Open Source model can succeed and help confirm that I am not just a masochist.

#saas #saas and open