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OCS 2020 Breakout: Joe Morrison, Azavea

Joe Morrison is focused on Earth Observation at Azavea. “Happiest when I'm the dumbest guy in the room. Generally, a pretty happy guy.”

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Is the open core "approach" dead? Let's find out!

Can you give us a quick intro on your background and what you’re working on these days? - 0:00

In December 2020, you released a blog, Death of an Open Source Business Model. Can you tell us about the motivation behind this piece, the highlights of the MapBox news, and how open core is now longer a tenable business model? -1:18

What did you learn from the community feedback and responses to the blog post? (see: Mapbox and Morrison, Adam Jacob’s response, Hacker News discussion about infrastructure vs application) - 5:17

You’ve incited a lot of fascinating conversation. There’s so much division and polarization in the definition of open source, which is orthogonal to open core. Interesting you mentioned Adam Jacob mentioning that there is no open source business model, which I agree with. (JJ elaborates on definition of business model and licenses.) I’m curious to learn how the MapBox GL JS change from a BSD license to a source available license affects their business, the evolution of the company, their revenue, their market dynamics and competitive dynamics. Also, most of the largest open source companies don’t change their licenses, and their ecosystems are much more diverse and competitive as a consequence - and so far, it doesn’t look like this has hurt those companies or prevented them from building great businesses. It’s actually created much more abundance. (JJ also elaborates on open core as an architectural paradigm as opposed to a business model, and how that frees companies and helps drive business model evolution.) What is your take on that? (See: https://gdal.org/) - 9:20

Concluding remarks. - 23:00


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