1. How did you get started?

After 7 years effort on open source community and 3 years business practice on open source services in China, we think it is a right time for us to start up TargetSource. More and more companies always ask us to help them to solve problems when they use open source, sometime if you are just a individual, it is not a long term strategy for company to get support on open source software. That’s why we started TargetSouce, an open source service company which delivers to end customers by a global collaboration network with partners base on the open source software.

2. What is your product?

TargetSource strategy is not building a single open source component or product such as JBoss, hibernate, Spring or so. From our point view, our customer requirement is a solution, which can help them solve their technology problem and optimize their business. So, TargetSource has developed the Enterprise-Ready Open Source™ Platform to enable these powerful new open source-based solutions. For each solution, TargetSource selects the right components, and then integrates, builds, tests and packages them to create stacks that are optimized for that solution.

3. Key milestones?

In the next coming 5 years , there will be three key milestones for TargetSource

1) 2008, startup year for core team building, spread enterprise-ready open source strategy to China, and enable more business and technology partner to use enterprise-ready open source software. At the same time , establish the partnership with open source companies such as Redhat, SUN Microsystem, SpringSource, MuleSource, IONA and so forth. Begin to build a good open source ecosystem in China.

2) 2011, with 3 years growth, TargetSource will growth fast and establish his capacity and position on open source services market in China, It will enter into a faster growth period.

3) 2013, TargetSource will become the NO.1 open source service company in China, whenever an company wants to use open source software , he should call TargetSource for help.

4. Why did you decide on the open source model?

Open source is already beyond the source code, it’s about process, the way on how to build good software; it’s about community, the way to let more people to share their ideas together; it’s about methodlogy, the way on how we think about software. Out vision is to build good software and let more enterprise to use it with the right way without lock into commercial software,give people the freedom to use software. Open Source is the right choice to make all this happen.

5. How do you see TargetSource in 5 years?

As I have metioned in the key milestones , TargetSource will growth fast in the next coming 5 years, we will provide more opportunity for smarter people who work on open source , we will hire those people from the community also contribute on open source in the community. TargetSource will be a community driven company, the one important think for us to do is to enable more open source community in China, right now , it’s important to breed community soil in China, then you will gain in the next coming 5 years. TargetSource will become an very important company of China software industry also be an important role in the open source world.

6. Some comments on Open Source and China

After running more than 7 years open source community in China, there are really so many things I can talk about open source in China, but the first thing I want to say that open source in China is just at the early age, there is still need to learn more about the open source community management methodology, how to adopt open source software into your software, how to share and exchange ideas between different kinds of community. The second is about education, if we want to make open source success in China also around the world, we need to let more student to learn and participate the open source, if you know it, maybe you will use, then you will participate.

That’s why I started the Open Source University program to give lectures around 100 universities in China.

Language is culture , If you want to do business well in China, the first thing is to learn Chinese, find the best local people with international experience and ability to collaboration with you. Finally, I think Open Source will be the best way to make China software industry become stronger.

I will soon interview Peter Cheng, the founder of the company, to share some of his ideas and vision for building Open Source business out of China.

Douglas S. Tracy, the EVP for IT (North America) and Chief Technology Officer, Global IT, Rolls-Royce. Doug has over 25 years of management experience in the private and public sector. In this role, he is responsible for supporting the IT needs of 8,000 employees in Rolls-Royce North America, a $4B subsidiary of Rolls-Royce plc. In addition, he is responsible globally for defining the medium and long range IT strategies for Rolls-Royce plc, a $15B and 40,000 employee organization that develops power solutions and services. As CTO, Doug determines the technical architecture upon which the IT environment of the future will converge and authorizes new investments in information technology solutions.

Barry Klawans. Barry was founder and CTO at Jaspersoft™ and responsible for the technical vision and direction. He has over 20 years of experience architecting and developing enterprise applications. Prior to JasperSoft, Barry was the Systems Architect at Bidcom, one of the original engineers at Remedy, and an early engineer at Sybase®, where he spent five years of development effort on the core server and network access layer.

Zak Greant, Electronic Frontier Strategist. Zak owns and operates Foo Associates, a strategic consultancy that helps companies adapt to and thrive on the Internet. Their clients include eZ Systems AS and the Mozilla® Foundation. Zak is an active participant in many free and open source communities, offering advice to groups like the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative.

Mikko Puhakka, Consultant and Researcher. Mikko is an open source consultant and a researcher at Helsinki University of Technology. He founded Holtron Ventures in 1999 and was an early investor in MySQL®. He is a founder of Open Tuesday in Finland.

Stephen Walli, Consultant. Stephen was vice president of R&D and founder at Softway Systems before being acquired by Microsoft®. Currently he consults on software business strategy.

Now, however I have undertaken a challenge to take the understanding of the emerging opportunities for entrepreneurs and investors in the OSS space in China to the next level.

The report will be made freely available both in English and Chinese targeting June release.

The work is quite challenging so I am grateful for all comments and advice as to what are the issues that should be addressed.

I will be in San Francisco during OSBC March 25-26th and in Beijing the week starting April 7th to discuss these issues face to face with anyone interested in the topic and possibly willing to contribute to the work all contributions included in the released work will of course be credited to the originators.

To get a better idea of the work please see the current outline below.

You are welcome to comment on this blog or e-mail me directly mikko.puhakka (at) gmail.com

Structure of the report (draft 0.1)

1. Introduction

1.1 Global trends in Open Source software deployment
1.2 Trends in Open Source software deployment in China including market size
1.3 Global Open Source communities vs. Chinese Open Source communities
1.4 Key Open Source business models with brief case examples
1.5 Fit of the key Open Source business models to Chinese market

2.0 Key Areas of Opportunity (Each topic has three aspects):
1) Technical
2) Market and business
3) Relevance and interface to China national technology programs:
• MOST 863, Torch Program, other key projects and software needs of China, and possible open source based solutions):

2.1 OSS Based Business Enablers
(Significant existing value gardens where redistribution of value is favored):

Purpose of this section is to outline some of the key areas where commonly used enabling technologies would significantly increase effectiveness while implementing solutions for future information society. It would not be a comprehensive “to-do” list, but rather a business and academic view of these key areas.

2.1.1 Protocols, tools, frameworks and engines
• Protocols, which are commonly used in IP world or on top of Internet Protocol stack (like authentication protocols, potentially peer-to-peer protocols that could be used in China etc)
• Commonly used Engines like, map engine, e-commerce engine etc.
• Product development tools or frameworks that could potentially provide additional value to Chinese market (different coding logic and understanding nuances of Chinese language etc)

2.2.2 Platforms, gateways and horizontal products
• E.g. operating systems such as Linux or products such as OpenOffice and e-commerce platforms
• Gateway (or protocol transcoding) which are commonly used

2.3.3 Security (e.g. Authentication, Transactional security like in e-commerce solutions)
2.3.4 Training and consulting
• How to create mechanisms to train efficiently people / organizations to take most out of the OSS based innovations and development
• How to link global software development and project management best practices into reality (University, public and private sector)

2.2 Software Driven Consumer and Business Services (applications)
(Opportunity spaces where new value can be developed):

Purpose of this section is to outline some of the key business areas where new value can be developed and created, in China but also globally. Especially areas in mobile communications, web business models for consumers, governmental and business-to-business are of interest.

New IPR creation will have more emphasize on this section.

As an outcome, this section will highlight not necessary detailed applications or services but rather a view of potential development directions and opportunity spaces (like wellbeing, environmental measurement solutions, social networks etc…).

2.2.1 E-services 2.0 infrastructure for governmental services (e.g. online tax services or other services for citizens, in Finland for instance Ministry of Labors’ registry of citizens and employment services)
2.2.2 Consumer 2.0 services (e.g. Amazon’s e-commerce)
2.2.3 On-demand business services (e.g. Salesforce.com service delivered as SAAS)

3.0 Some Other Key Issues

- Educational aspects through University collaboration?
- Best practices for OSS based software development, quality assurance and testing
- Knowledge transfer?
- Joint venture Company model based on Finnish/international business template?
- Consulting and training opportunities for agile companies?
- Mobile communication and related OSS areas as a separate item!

4.0 Public Sector and its Role in China

- A ‘’mind map’’ explaining the relationships and roles of various public organizations

5.0 Conclusions and Recommendations

6.0 References

Some reactions have surprised me a quite a bit. I have received questions and comments such as that ‘’we lost yet another European high-tech company to the US’’, ‘’does this destroy the promise of open source as MySQL becomes part of this big public company?’’

I would accept the first comment if the company had been sold under priced, but we did not lose MySQL, we SOLD it for 1 BILLION dollars!

This was great news for the Nordic start-up community and especially open source start-up community: a role model and a strong message to the investment community that we can both build great companies in the open source space and we know how to deliver value to the investors.

Now it is time to take the lessons learnt from that case as well as use it as a reference to build the next cases, and I believe we are well on our way.

Something that today’s young entrepreneurs should note about MySQL, it took 12 years to build the business, there are always some exceptions like YouTube where the cashing out happens very quickly, but I would suggest that the timeframe MySQL had is more realistic as a model.

I want to end this post with a quote from Mårten Mickos, CEO of MySQL, which well explains type of things an early investor needs to do and what kind of value they can bring by being insane or mad enough:

‘’Holtron played a pivotal role in the commercial growth of MySQL by being the first VC in early 2001 to present a term sheet. This contributed to
bringing other investors on board, and it also helped me make the decision to join MySQL and not take the other CEO position I was being offered at the time.’’

Secondly Spain seems to have disproportionate amount of open source developers compared to many other countries.

Disclaimer: I am on the board of Ebox & have been involved in setting the event up

Some key issues to consider in my view are:

1) Microsoft still has huge resources that enable them to have their way in most markets, including China if allowed
2) The power of Linux and OSS in general lies in mobilizing huge numbers of volunteers as developers, as evangelists, as testers etc that are hard to match by traditional software makers and vendors
3) So far this formation of large enough communities has not taken place in China, so the vendors of Linux and OS software have to compete on Microsoft’s terms and other software providers terms, without the benefit of an active community, and that is just too tough, hopefully this is about to change

Q1 Name some key milestones in Chinese Open Source history

The origin of the Chinese open source activities can be dated back in the beginning of 1990s, when Dr. Gong Ming was working on his PhD research topic on parallel processing in Helsinki University of Technology in Finland. He discovered Linux operating system from an educational network in 1991 and later on started deployment and development on it. The major movement related to China when:

- in 1996, Dr. Gong Min brought the Linux operating system within 20 discs back to China.
- The first Chinese Linux server was set up on 5.5.1997 in Chang Zhou, Jiang Su Province. Its domain name is cLinux.ml.org
- The first Chinese Linux user group is established in Shanghai
- China Software Association Free Software R&D Branch was established in Beijing in 17.6.1997. The biggest Chinese free source download site was built under the domain “free.cei.gov.cn”
- “Linux and Chinese Software Industry” Discussion Forum was organized by the Chinese Information Industry Ministry in July 1999. This is the first action to support Linux from the Chinese government.
- On 7.3.2000, the first Chinese Linux company - Blue Point went for IPO in US. Its stock price rise up more than 400%, counting for $0.4 billion.
- In June 2000, Beijing Red Flag Software Co. Ltd was established.
- In Feb 2002, China Software Association Co-Create Software Branch established in Beijing.
- On 24.6.2000, the Chinese government issued the first policy to promote and encourage the development of Chinese software and integrated circuits - “Some policy to encourage the development of software and IC industry”, also called “No. 18 Document”.
- In December 2002, the Ministry of Information Industry and Science and Technology together organized “Linux Software and Application Promotion Discussion Forum”. This is a signal from the Chinese government to support the Linux software development
- “Open Source Software Development Summit in China” was held by China Software Association Co-Create Software Branch together with other government offices on 23.9.2003
- On 3.4.2004, China, South Korea and Japan together held “OSS Seminar”
- on 22.7.2004, China OSS Promotion Union was eatablished. This is the first open source organization in China.
- On 28.2.2005, the “Chinese Open Source Week” was first held in Beijing. This is the first Asian-wide huge open source event held by China.
- on 5.3.2005, Mozilla China announced its settlement in China
- on 10.5.2005, China Linux Industry Strategic alliance was established in Beijing. It was initiated by CSIP (Ministry of Information Industry Software and Integrated Circuits Promotion Center)
- on 30.11.2005, “IP China 2005: Open Source Software and IPR Annual Meeting” was held in Beijing
- on 29.8.2006, MySQL and a Chinese open source company “GreatLinux” announced a strategic partnership to deliver commercial MySQL-based solutions to the burgeoning Chinese market.

Q2 What are some key efforts around Open Source right now?

The Chinese government has been putting lots of effort in encouraging open source development. Policies like “No. 18 Document” and “No. 47 Document” were issued for promoting open source. They not only contain the government good wish, but also practical support like from taxation, finance, purchase, import and export…

Linux development started since the beginning of 2000, and comprises a huge part of open source development in China. When people talk about open source nowadays, many people will right away associate the discussion to Linux. Based on CCW Research, Linux software market sales reached 570 million Yuan in 2003, and 750 million in 2004 with 32% growth. Amongst which, the server-side product sales was 623.2 million Yuan, and desktop sales – 126.8 million Yuan. Till 2005, the top three players in the market are TurboLinux[1], Red Flag Software[2], and China Standard Software[3].

Though the Linux development has been around 30% increase within the recent years, still the utilization rate is rather low. Besides the known usability issue, one of the root problems is software piracy. Microsoft got 95% of the market in the Chinese market thanks to that since the mid 1990s. And it is hard for Linux to make its entry as the market is already dominated by Microsoft. Even Bill Gates said that “It’s easier for our software to compete with Linux when there’s piracy than when there’s not”. On the other hand, the competition in the Linux market is becoming fierce. Microsoft started offering $3 Windows XP to developing countries’ governments and educations. Chinese Linux vendors are currently focusing on government and small to medium sized enterprise market. In order to gain market shares, the market research suggested industry cooperation and business acquisition to be a business strategy to carry out for the domestic Linux vendors.

After year 2004, the concept of open source got wider spread in China. This also thanks to the many successful commercializations of open source software globally. However, understanding of open source is still relatively fresh in China. in many cases, it could be incorrect, subjective or incomplete. However, as open source is a new development direction in the software industry, many open source companies received venture capital investment and started their development. Most of them are trying to copying the existing business models from the west. However revenue generation still remains a reluctant topic for them to discuss. There are a few successful example only. One is Discuz, a Chinese open source discussion platform. Currently there are over 30,000 discussion forums using its product all over the world. Otherwise companies like Hoodong, Huihoo have also been relatively successful in its development. IT people in China do realize the benefits of open source, yet the Chinese market is special and immature, finding out the right path for commercialization may take still several years.

Foreign companies have been looking into the Chinese market for new opportunities. Companies like MySQL, RedHat, Mozilla, Novell, Oracle, Ubuntu, etc have all been establishing business in China.

[1] TurboLinux is an open source software company focusing on offering enterprise software solutions, and support service based on Linux. It is founded in the US in the early 1990s and entered the Chinese market in 1999. www.turbolinux.com.cn
[2] RedFlag Software is the biggest and most well-known Chinese Linux vendor. http://www.redflag-linux.com/
[3] China Standard Software is located in Shanghai. Its main products and services includes Linux desktop, Linux server, office suits and security software. http://www.cs2c.com.cn

Q3. What are your key thoughts on the state of the China’s Open Source a) today, and b) how does the future look?

The Chinese open source is still very young nowadays, and this situation will not change rapidly. There are many reasons behind:
1) The software piracy made Microsoft Windows the dominant operating system with 95% of the whole operating system market. The user base for open source is thus really small, not mentioning the open source development.
2) The Chinese legal system for open source IPR is non-existing.
3) The understanding of open source is still very vague and incomplete. One reason is that free source was first translated into Chinese as “free of charge” software… thus also affect the understanding of open source.
4) The Chinese open source community has just been started. It is young and in great need of serious development.

Despite of the problem mentioned above, I see a very promising Chinese market for open source. According to our Chinese philosophy, in order to win or succeed, time, location and people are the 3 key factors; however the most important among these three is people. At the moment, the time has come for the open source to expand in China. The huge Chinese market is attractive; thus the location is not bad for open source. However the Chinese market is lacking huge number of open source professionals. And this situation cannot be changed easily without serious effort. In order to succeed in the Chinese market, raising up a huge open source audience by introducing the open source concepts, business models, legal issues, community management as well as technical knowledge is essential.

In addition, the Chinese market is fulled with varieties and dimensions. Open source comparing to proprietary software has the advantage on pricing. Based on the current Chinese market, there are a lot of potentials in all industries to compete with proprietary software, especially in the small, medium sized enterprise market, the education sector, regions and provinces under average development.

But to get started I wanted to ask JingJing few questions:

Q1. Tell briefly about your background and interest in software business

I have been working in the software industry in Finland since 2002. I first started as a research assistant on mobile services in Nokia Research Center while studying for my bachelor degree on software engineering. After finishing my bachelor, I became a software engineer working in the industry while continuing a further master degree study at Helsinki University of Technology on software business and engineering. I have been a software designer, software tester, test manager, and now a quality assurance consultant throughout these years.

Software business has always been of interest to me. In 2004, I started looking into open source software business through a course assignment in the university. The more I read and talk with people about it, the more attractive it appears to me. I was lucky to get the opportunity to work with you Mikko (I believe I was the lucky one) since the beginning of 2007 in research studies on open source software business in China. The result of my research will be presented in my master thesis work.

I like the idea of “openness” - open mindset, open development, open source and open competition. I have a strong believe in the future of open source. The software market in China is still very young yet growing intensively on yearly basis. The combination of open source and Chinese software market could provide true social and economy values to the development in China.

Q2. Please give a brief overview of the Chinese Software industry e.g. size, growth-rate, special areas of interest

I see the Chinese software market to be very attractive. In 2004, the market size was about 53.9 billion Yuan (5.2 billion euro). From Jan-May 2007, the software market reached 178.3 billion euros sales revenue. Though the current market size is still rather small, comprising 6% of the global market, one has to take into consideration that software industry was almost non-existing 15 years ago in China. Within the last decade, the Chinese software market has been growing through fast development and restructuring with around 30% growth rate annually. With the ever increasing internal interests and international focus on China, the Chinese government estimates a staggering growth reaching 4800 billion Yuan sales (463 billion euros), with 4.4 billion euro export and outsourcing, and 1.29 million professionals till 2010.

Some special areas of interests: Enterprise software market has been showing steady growth in the recent years, as more and more companies have come to realize the values that enterprise software could provide. Additionally, it has been predicted that the rapid growth in Internet use will further drive the demand for software that accommodates broadband services, such as multimedia compatible software that will enable users to enjoy broadband contents. Blog hosting and multimedia content sharing, similar to MySpace and Youtube, have been the hot investment spots in the recent years.

Q3. Are there any special characteristics as to how the Chinese software market works that you want to highlight?

The Chinese market does have some interesting characteristics:
- huge amount of IT graduates yearly: It is estimated that Chinese universities will provide about 150,000 – 200,000 IT workers annually.
- The low labor costs: According to the opinion of a local IT professional, an engineer costing $4000 in the US only costs $500 in Shanghai. And it could be much less other than in Beijing and Shanghai.
- 30% annual growth of the Chinese software market
- the government’s determination in supporting the software industry development. Special benefits are offered on taxation deduction (VAT and EIT), exempt on import and export tax.

The Chinese software industry is still very young and small comparing to the global market. The development of the software industry is far behind, and not in proportion compared to the hardware industry. The difference between enterprise market and consumer market is huge (96.62% vs. 3.38% in 2004). The Chinese government, telecommunication, education, banking and production have been the key places of investments into IT in 2004. Software piracy remains a big problem in the Chinese market. The situation in the consumer market will gradually improve as the campaign on fighting software piracy continues in China.

As the Chinese market in general is still immature, the Chinese government has been taking actions to protect and support the local Chinese companies against competitions from global players. This can appear in many forms - Chinese own standards, favoring domestic software products, regulations, etc. Foreign companies coming to the Chinese market must be aware of these issues before their entry.

Some additional comments on software piracy in China: Microsoft has been complaining about it since its entry to the Chinese market. Actually comparing to Microsoft, I think it is the whole Chinese domestic software industry that has suffered the most. And that is one of the reasons which causes the Chinese market to be still very immature and hinders a healthy growth through time.

Q4. How have the Chinese traditionally worked with foreign software vendors, do you see any emerging trends?

The most common means for foreign software vendors working in the Chinese market is to:

- buy Chinese companies,
- set up joint ventures with Chinese companies,
- outsourcing,
- set up subsidiaries
- or through partnership

The Chinese market has been very attractive and many foreign companies are looking into the Chinese market for opportunities. They have advanced technology and wonderful business models, but lack of real experience with the local environment of the industry and the market information. To get an initial understanding, many companies have started their piloting operation in China through partnership with local Chinese companies in localization, further development and marketing operations.

Q5. Do you see any big challenges in Chinese software industry that the companies and organizations from abroad could help to solve together with Chinese?

I see two issues here:

1) The Chinese software industry has lots of good programmers produced by the Chinese academy annually. But at the moment, the market is really in need of experienced IT professionals with various management skills in areas such as project, quality, process, IPR and business. The resource defines the capability of the market. In order to build up a better environment for further development, education, training and knowledge transfer could be a direction where foreign companies can bring extensive knowledge and experiences to the Chinese market.

2) Though China has good programmers, comparing to the foreign companies there is a lack of real technical and domain knowledge and experience. At the moment, in those international companies most of the complex R&D work is done abroad. Chinese subsidiaries are normally working on localization and marketing issues. One key reason I see is that the foreign companies are afraid of losing their IPRs. However, to build up the Chinese software industry, China needs to strengthen its R&D capability. I have been wondering - is there a possibility that foreign companies can gradually provide technology transfer to the Chinese market?

Part II will be looking at the Emergence of Open Source within Chinese software industry.

Some key advice Eero pointed out in the article was the importance of partners and channels:

‘’Another surprise is partner networking, or actually the lack of it. Maybe this is result of open source companies’ natural tendency to focus on services and, for the most part, on a direct sales model. Open source companies have created tight-knit partner communities, which are excellent vehicles for the self-promoting (every self-respecting open source company seems to be partner with at least 10 other open source companies), while at the same time there has been very limited success in creating truly significant partner networks (system integrators, VARs) to push open source solutions to the end users….’’

‘’ Focus on partners, partners that sell for you. Strategic partners are great to increase credibility, but won’t pay your bills. Peer partners are great to increase overall visibility, but won’t pay your bills. Partners who will deliver your solution to the paying customer are a godsend - they pay your bills. Understand what motivates partners, and keep them happy and productive!’’

I am 100% behind that piece of advice, but while agreeing that is the way to go, the big question for me (and I suppose for many entrepreneurs) is how? How to execute the sound strategy and identify and actually get those key partners critical for your business success or even survival?

Continuent has gone through couple of phases 1) under the name Emic Networks with more traditional proprietary approach and 2) under the current name Continuent changing the approach to Open Source.

Q1. How has your company’s partnering strategy changed while moving from a proprietary to open source model? Have you had to dismiss some earlier partners’ as they did not fit the new approach?

A1. Over the course of the years there have been natural ‘churn rate’ among channel partners for number of reasons, but we did not have to make major overhaul of the partner network. As a part of the change from completely proprietary solution to the commercial open source we have kept the licensing, pricing and partner discounts very attractive.

There was more significant change in our channel-strategy when we expanded database support from MySQL-only solution (which was the case with our proprietary solution) to also cover PostgreSQL and EnterpriseDB. MySQL’s adoption rate is clearly larger than any other open source databases, but interestingly enough due MySQL’s own quite aggressive direct sales approach and primary focus in embedded market, MySQL has not developed extensive network of resellers or systems integrators.

There is no one single company behind PostgreSQL. That has created more opportunities for local system integrators and there seems to be more partner opportunities for value-add providers such Continuent.

Q2. Any special challenges in building the business out of Finland?

A2. When Continuent was established in Finland, our mindset was from the day one to be ‘born-global’. It naturally did help us that my primary residence has been US for the past 14 years and I have been involved with cross-Atlantic software business this whole time. Finland has definitely significant good-will value and healthy respect within open source community with number of visible open source visionaries and leaders, for example Linus and Mårten, coming out of Finland. This creates a good ground to build successful open source companies.

The key challenge with Finland, and almost any European based companies, is the lack of the understanding in customers actual needs (largest open source customers are in USA, and their needs are not always same as smaller European based customers) and effectively getting solutions to the market.

There always is very good and solid technical foundation, but there seems to be disconnection what actual customer needs are and how to take those into account in the process creating solutions out of these core technologies.

As valuable the open source community is giving feedback, unfortunately you can’t solely trust the judgment of the masses. The key decisions need to be done internally, and those need to be based on solid market intelligence and true understanding of the customer needs.

Q3.Please outline a short description as to how to do it e.g. 3 do’s and 3 don’ts

A3. The three DO’s for the aspiring open source entrepreneurs from Finland, or from Europe in general:

ii) Follow Steve Job’s lead and build ‘insanely great’ solutions. ‘Me too’ just doesn’t cut it. ‘Good enough’ won’t create excitement.

iii) Think hard who can be the best partners to take your solution to the market. The larger partner the better, but early on you need to settle smaller partners until you have increase your credibility.

And Don’ts:

i) Don’t forget to define your ideal customers (note: first customers may not be ideal on the long run, thus you really need to define the ideal customer). You need to address a real need of this ideal customer. You also need to offer a complete solution. Don’t assume that all customers are alike. USA customers tend to build larger systems catering larger markets, thus they typically require more (quality, functionality, supportability), but this will also help your smaller customers.

ii) Don’t forget your community: as you give to your community, it is fair to expect real value (contribution, testing, support) back. Community will be your best marketing vehicle and also excellent source to recruit new talent.

iii) Don’t forget that your solution and market takes time to mature. Make sure you have adequate funding to ride the tough times, which there will be plenty. You can safely assume that you are in the business for a long haul, minimum 5-7 years, before you can see any significant success. For example MySQL has been around almost 15 years (taking account Monty’s early years) and it took first 7 years (10 if you count the early years) to reach 5 Million euro revenue.