open source slas
TRANSCRIPT
Bio• Worked for 6 years at Heroku, deployment PaaS. Subsidiary of
SalesForce, one of the largest SaaS companies in the world.
• Working for past year at Convox, open source deployment toolkit. Goals:
• Help teams save time and money making cloud infrastructure effortless
• Build successful open source project
• Build viable open source business
• Grateful for the opportunity to experiment with new software and business models
Follow Along on GitHubhttps://github.com/convox/rack
Go, Docker, AWS toolkit Used by 100s of companies
Software Agreement Dialogs…
Employment AgreementHiring Manager: Here is a role, responsibilities, and a salary.
Engineer: I accept!
Manager: Here are the things we need to do this week to keep our business running.
Engineer: Consider it done!
Manager: Great job. Here is your paycheck.
SaaS Agreement
Decision Maker: Here is some functionality I need to run my business and a budget to buy it.
Vendor: We do that and its $X / month which fits in your budget!
Decision Maker: Great. Here is my business credit card.
SaaS Agreement Upgrade Cycle
Decision Maker: I wish this service also did X.
Vendor: We do that on the pro plan that is $Y / month.
Tech: Great. You can charge me more.
SaaS Agreement Support Cycle
Decision Maker: I wish this service also did Y.
Vendor: We don’t support that yet. Talk to this Product Manager to get it on the roadmap.
Decision Maker: Ok I’ll talk and wait. I’m glad my team doesn’t have to build it.
SaaS Agreement Rejection Cycle
Decision Maker: I wish this service also did Y.
Vendor: We don’t support that.
Decision Maker: Bummer. I need this so find another vendor I can pay for this functionality, and terminate my subscription.
or
Decision Maker: Bummer. I’ll pay staff to build it in house.
OSS Agreement
Tech: Here is some functionality I need to run my business.
OSS Project: We already solved that. Agree to the software license and you can use it free of charge.
Tech: Sweet. Free and open software is amazingly helpful for getting my job done.
OSS Agreement Support Cycle
Tech: I wish this software also did Y
Abandoned OSS Project: <crickets>
Incompatible OSS Project: Sorry we don’t want to do that
Facilitating OSS Project: Interesting idea. Follow these guidelines to contribute a patch. We will help you and support the feature.
Magic OSS Project: Killer idea. Here is your solution.
Tech: Ok. Open source is [challenging | nice | amazing]. I’m glad I don’t have to solve everything myself.
Service Level Agreements• Software License
• Used as-is…
• Subscriptions
• Pay $25/month for 3 users access
• Support expectations
• Community; same-day
• Service guarantees like uptime and performance or resource
• 99.9% uptime; 10k emails / month
Service Level Agreements
• Explicit
• Measurable
• Monetizable
OSS SLAs• Generally free software “as-is” and support is best effort
• Why not?
• Sell a version as SaaS (with uptime assurances)
• Sell some closed features (open core)
• Sell same-day or same-hour support (tiered support)
• Sell a way for priority feature work (professional services)
• Sell contracts for migrations and training (professional services)
OSS SLAs Challenges
• Bootstrapping. Full time support and engineering costs real money.
• Packaging and pricing. Building a software sales system costs real time and energy.
• Psychology. Consumers have a free version. Why pay anything?
OSS SLAs My Challenges
• People balk at $25 / user / month
• GitHub is $9 / mo
• AWS bills are $5k / month
• Engineers cost $10k / month
• Don’t know how to price guarantees around uptime
• How much is it worth to you?
• How much will it cost to meet? Need engineers on call 24/7
• What happens when we don’t hit it?
• Trust
• Takes a lot of time and energy to gain trust
OSS SLAs My Wishes
• More OSS projects sell services. Run the project like a business. Find ways to guarantee software quality without working for free.
• CTOs buy something. Tech company budgets are huge. They could be better understanding OSS value sponsoring more work which benefits us all.
• We all keep working on OSS. Critical infrastructure for our industry.
• OSS becomes a clear value add, not an obstacle to selling software.
