Question

What are the different strategies of oss licensing?

Answer 1

The optimization strategy is an open source manifestation of Clayton Christensen's "law of conservation of modularity." In the OSS application of Christensen's law, one layer of a software stack is "modular and conformable," allowing adjacent software layers to be "optimized." The modular and conformable layers are commodities, and are unprofitable or only marginally profitable software businesses. The Linux operating system is an example. The disruption caused by a modular and conformable operating system such as Linux serves to erode margins for other operating system vendors like Sun, Wind River, and Microsoft. Winners under Christensen's law are the adjacent, interdependent layers of the software stack, the layers where applications are optimized to achieve greater value, and where, correspondingly, better pricing power exists. Oracle provides an example of an optimized adjacent layer, as an ROI assessment by Mainstay Partners illustrates.