Open Source and Service Level Agreements

[nzoschke]

I'm working full time on Convox (web, github), an open-source tool for deploying, managing, and monitoring applications on cloud infrastructure. The goal is to build a successful open source software project and business.

Both pose tremendous challenges, but I'm seeing a pattern emerging on the business side. People are taking the software project and trying it out and using it for free but warming up to the idea of paying Convox for professional support and service of various flavors. Some examples:

• We want your help keeping our website up 99.9% of the time
• We want a way to send an email with questions and get a response the same day
• We need to have a way to page an engineer at any time of the day or night and
• We want to request a feature and know it'll get built within a week

Uptime, support, migrations and feature work can all be viewed as services. With services you can form explicit contracts around expectations, and put a monetary price on it. This is called a Service Level Agreement or SLA.

I'd like to share my experiences and observations here and discuss how this type of thinking might help us all understand software and business in general and with open source.

One big question to probe is:

You hire full time staff and pay big salaries to fulfill business expectations. Can part of these budgets be transferred to pay experts that write open source software?

[elof]

👍 I'll get you on docket now

[elof]

Hi Noah, We're gearing up for the next OSSAT on Fri 6/9 in downtown SF at Google Launchpad. Would love to have you attend and there are a few community speaking spots left if you have something you'd like to talk about this year around :)

http://opensourceshowandtell.com for all the infos.

Even if you can't attend helping us get the word out by telling a friend or posting to some social media would be greatly appreciated. Let me know if you have any questions at all.

[elof]

Hi Noah, it took me way way to long, but I finally got your talk from last year up on the internet. Check it out here: https://vimeo.com/224131603