A report from developer-focused analyst Redmonk finds “there does not seem to be a clear link between moving from an open source to proprietary license and increasing the company’s value.”
Senior analyst Rachel Stevens studied the question of whether the companies that changed from open source to proprietary licenses have since reported better financial positions.
In particular, she looked at MongoDB, which changed from AGPL (GNU Affero General Public License) to its SSPL (Server Side Public License) in 2018; Elastic Co, which changed from Apache 2 to SSPL or Elastic License in early 2021; HashiCorp, which changed from MPL (Mozilla Public License 2.0) a year ago, and Confluent, which checked from Apache 2 to its own Confluent Community License in 2018.
The report is too recent to take account of Elastic’s reversion to AGPL; and the financial impact of that is of course yet to be known, though it is perhaps unlikely that the switch back would have been made if the company considered it detrimental to its finances. Rather, Elastic’s latest licensing change reinforces the view that proprietary licenses are not necessarily more profitable.
As Stevens acknowledges, the topic is a difficult one since there are always other factors involved in financial results, including competition, other aspects of company performance, and the general macroeconomic environment.
All the companies studied increased their revenue after their license change, Stevens said, but added that the rate of change was similar to that before the change.
Another measure is market capitalization – the total value of a company as determined by the market for its shares. MongoDB skews the figures, since its growth in market cap is much greater than the other three companies, and HashiCorp’s valuation dropped.
There is a key remark though at the end of the report. “It’s worth noting that none of these companies are profitable yet. This means that valuation is primarily driven by expected growth in future cash flow,” Stevens said.
The biggest factor in the move to more restrictive licenses was the hyperscale cloud vendors offering open source software products as a service, profiting from their hosting but with no direct benefit to the provider of the open source software. MongoDB stated in 2018 that “once an open source project becomes interesting or popular, it becomes too easy for the cloud vendors to capture all the value and give nothing back to the community.”
Six years later, it remains the case that the large cloud vendors are highly profitable, but that these companies who changed their license are not.
In February this year, Bruce Perens, creator of the 1998 Open Source Definition, described open source as “a great corporate welfare program” and not at all what he had intended.
Peter Zaitsev, co-founder of Percona which specialized in open source database managers, told DevClass that changing away from open source licenses in an attempt to increase profits would not succeed, because of the amount of code already out there under permissive licenses as well as the fact that it tended to block innovation.
The new Redmonk report suggests that such license manoeuvres are neither fatal nor beneficial to the finances of the companies involved – though there are so many caveats that it is impossible to draw firm conclusions.