Constantinos Bairaktaris presentation @ Mobile Monday Athens (Jan 16 2012) - Topic: Making money with open source

1. Making money with Open Source: Our
story

2. Who
Konstantinos Bairaktaris
Lead engineer of Transifex
kbairak@indifex.com

3. A few things about Transifex
● Server sorftware
● Cloud service
● Workflow management
● Remote collaboration
● Crowdsourcing / community
● Hosting solution
and, of course,
● Localization

4. bitbucket

5. The big How?
There are a number of ways someone
can make money from Open Source
software

6. The big How?
The actual sales part:
● Services around the product
(support, consulting)
● Dual licensing / Enterprise versions
● Software-as-a-Service / hosting
While at the same time:
● Leveraging all the advantages of
developing an Open Source product

7. Our business model
Our products:

8. Our business model
Our products:
● Transifex.net

9. Our business model
Our products:
● Transifex.net
● Transifex, community edition

10. Our business model
Our products:
● Transifex.net
● Transifex, community edition
● Transifex, enterprise edition

11. Our business model
How it works:
● Transifex community edition is Open
Source software
● It's developed in such a way that it
can be used both as server software
and as development library

12. Our business model
How it works (cont):
● Transifex.net and Transifex enterprise
edition are built using Transifex
community edition as a library
● Our software is modular so we can
'compile' tailored enterprise editions
“on the fly”
● Transifex.net can be said to be our
own enterprise edition

13. Our business model
Target audience, non-paying:
● Users/organizations who host their
projects on Transifex.net using the
'free' plan
● Users/organizations who use and/or
modify Transifex community edition
on their own infrastructure

14. Our business model
Target audience, paying:
● Subscriptions to our paid plans (SaaS
sales)
● Enterprise sales/collaborations:
support, consulting, hosting, funding
for new features on Transifex.net,
development of their own, licensed
Transifex enterprise edition

15. What Open Source means for
Transifex
and a few notes around marketing

16. What Open Source means for
Transifex
Product is open source:
● Originally developed as a GsoC
project
● Transifex is developed on Open
Source Frameworks (whose developers
tend to use Transifex)
● Lots of presentations at Open Source
conferences
● It “goes down well” with the Open
Source community

17. What Open Source means for
Transifex
Product is open source (cont):
● Originally offered as standalone
software
● Potential clients can test and review
the product before collaboration
● Quality patches, bug reports and
beta testing from the community
● No vendor lock-in, customers can
switch to their own version of
Transifex at any time

18. What Open Source means for
Transifex
Our stance towards the Open Source
community:
● Our free plan includes unlimited quotas
for Open Source projects
● We are more than willing to provide
advanced features to Open Source
projects
● We get a lot of love back from the
community
● Product simply fits users' needs
(especially Open Source projects)

19. How can a local team provide
support to a global audience
● SaaS sales have low cost
● Marketing plan revolves around Open
Source
● State-of-the-art support services
● Low-latency support (which can lead to
sales)
● Development team is distributed
around the world

20. Thank you for listening
Questions?