Dirk Riehle of SAP Re-Invents the Wheel

Dirk Reihle of SAP has just released a piece called The Commercial Open Source Business Model. He does a good job of giving a broad overview of the various models and how different business functions are affected. He does not go into a lot of detail in any of these areas. However nearly everything he says is covered in the Beekeeper model documents, particularly Part II. So why didn’t he reference them?

He obviously spent a lot of time reading articles and talking to people. But he clearly did not spend any time reading his own blog. If he had done so he would have seen references to the Beekeeper model in the comment trails we have had over the past year.

• open-source-in-the-share-of-wallet-wars

• international-journal-of-open-source-software-and-processes

I particularly like this quote of his:

With the exception of Olson’s work, none of the prior works focus on commercial open source, and Olson mostly addresses its intellectual property aspects. In contrast, this paper comprehensively discusses the key properties of commercial open source firms across all business functions.

In the Beekeeper Part II the effects of the commercial open source model on engineering is covered in reasonable depth for 15 pages. His analysis of the same topic is only 8 sentences. That is hardly ‘comprehensive discussion’.

I wish he’d read the Beekeeper before he started, he might have been able to build on it to create something new and original.