Open Adoption Software: 2016 Year In Review

About a year ago, I started sharing thoughts about open technologies. I thought I’d recap key developments in the category over the past year here and also offer some predictions for 2017. I’d welcome your comments.

Introduction to the Open Adoption Software market

2016 was another strong year in the world of open source software. We learned without a shadow of a doubt that the world’s largest businesses not only use open source but also are willing to contribute heavily back to the open source community. It’s a state of affairs that presents great opportunities, but also some risk for companies relying on previous models of open source monetization.

At Accel, we’re using a new term for our go-to-market and company building philosophy around open source: Open Adoption Software, or OAS. While some may not aspire to build large, durable companies around open source projects, we believe that there needs to be more dialogue on this topic for those who do. We had been talking a lot about OAS as a new model of open source internally for a few years. After some great discussions that began at our OPEN conference last April, and with help from the community, we selected the OAS monicker to reflect the unique way in which open source software is adopted.

Rather than clinging to proprietary software models of striving for profit right off the bat, or even to legacy open source models where vendors focus paid support for free software, successful OAS companies will carefully consider each phase of their growth in light of current open source trends. The three distinct phases of the OAS lifecycle, which we call the “3 P’s,” are Project, Product and Profit. Each one of these represents a new opportunity to maximize benefits for both OAS communities and companies.

Based on what we have seen in 2016, we are confident that OAS is poised to become the de facto model across a wide swath of the enterprise IT landscape.