 I'm ready. I don't want to mispronounce your name. It's Ludovic DeBose. Yes. I'm so proud of you. All right. Here we are. We're going to get started. Thank you everyone and welcome once again to the Community Deb Room if you were already here before. If not, welcome to all new members of our audience. We're here to hear now from Ludovic DeBose about the interplay between corporate and community interests and let us welcome Ludovic. 25 minutes, right? So hello everybody. So I'm going to talk about corporate and community interests. So what happened to us in these 14 years? What we tried to learn about the difficulties of running a business and running a business that does open source. So first, who am I? So I created and I've been working for XWiki now for 14 years. So the company was created in 2004. The open source software was actually created six months before. But it was kind of the same thing, the same project. Before that, I had worked in an internet company doing statistical analysis of internet usage and before that, at Netscape. What we do is fully open source. The company itself is bootstrapped. We haven't raised any money, only the money of the employees actually. And today, we're a company that does about 2 million euros revenue. And one thing that is important is that we want to be good open source citizens. So it was in the project to be open source right from the beginning and we have maintained that. So what do we actually do? We do a wiki software for the enterprise. We have quite some innovative features in it. Wikis are still innovative for companies. So not for all companies, it's not necessarily something that is completely mainstream. It's still an innovation for many companies. For some, it's not at all, but for many companies it still is. And our wiki itself has innovative features and innovative approaches. It's bootstrap-based and responsive. We have done a lot of work and usability. It's available on the cloud. I'm not going to talk too much about that. It's a recognized software today. Amazon is using it and many, many companies are using it. And as a company, we also have done a second product out of our research projects, which is called CripPad, which is a secure real-time editor. So particularity is that it encrypts all the content on the servers. So it's actually a radical new technology where you can do collaboration, but the server doesn't know anything about what is going on. You can go check it out at CripPad.fr. So what have we learned in these 14 years of being a company that does open source? So first, we have learned that open source is helping us. So it's important to acknowledge and understand how open source is helping us as a company. There are issues of innovation. There are issues of funding. I'll come back to that. And of course, there is a paradox. One of the first things people tell me when I tell them, ah, we're doing open source software, which basically means that the software is not, you don't pay for the software. And so how do you make money? Like first question, how do you actually do that? And so it's how do you sell something that is free? And then there is a difficulty and a problem to look. How do you actually make money? How do you grow? And how do you stay open source? It's interesting. You can see that open source can be a good way to get yourself known. Once you start to be known, how do you actually stay open source? So first, open source helps us. So I want to point out a few ways how open source is helping us. First, it has allowed us to not take outside money. So that's actually interesting because I'll come back on that point. Why does it mean, what's the issue potentially between open source and outside money? So it allowed us to not take outside money because it allowed us to progressively build the software. So we started with service. So we launched the product, not much marketing. People look at it. Oh, it's interesting. Could you do that for us? And potentially you do a little bit of business. And this is actually difficult when you do a proprietary software. You do a proprietary software. You put the price on it right away. You're creating a kind of a blockage for the client. If it's not good enough, he's not going to pay for it. So the first thing is that it allowed us to progressively grow and not take outside money. The open source is providing our user base. So we have, it provides credibility. So we have many users. So when we go see companies, we say, look, we have that many users that use it, provides credibility. It makes us known. And that's actually really important. It actually brings an answer to a question also, which is that companies often ask is, what if your company goes down? Well, if the company goes down, there's still the open source software. There's people that can take over. We're not the only ones. And that's actually a question that happens for many small companies that are created. The first question that companies will ask is, what if your company goes down? It helps you enter large companies with less marketing. So basically companies try the software themselves and then they will. So basically you could say that a part of the pre-sales is done by the companies themselves. So they do all the validation. And then they come when it's when, okay, we validated that it's the right software. So it looks good. Could you provide some services to us now? It also helped us for finance research projects. So as a company, we didn't take outside funding, but we took research projects. So in France, there is a chance that we can get we can get something called Crédient pour Recherche. And this is actually pays back a piece of your R&D. You can also candidate for a research project. And at the European level, you can also candidate for research project. Whoever has a company and does open source, I tell you, go for these research projects. It's a lot of money and it can help you really fund what you do. There's actually a talk in the decentralization of the room about research project funding. So I started the project six months before I created the company, but it's it was the same project. So it's really technical, the reason the fact that the company was created six months later. I created the company to take the first revenues. But basically the idea was that there would be a company right from the start. So we were a type of profile of open source software where we didn't do the software being in another company. And then it spread and then, oh, look, there are people interested, let's create a company. There are open source software like that where an open source software created from scratch as a new software. With the idea that we would live from it. It also also contributed help make your software better. And that's also, of course, very important. So one thing is, and this is a bit specific. So one thing that is important to understand is this is our experience. It's the experience of X-Wiki. So not everything will apply to other types of company or other types of cases, types of community. We're a medium-sized community, medium-sized software, enterprise software. It's not the same thing. We're quite different, for example, for we're doing software for intranets. This means that not everything we do is visible. For example, Drupal, they do websites publicly so everybody sees their software all the time. Our software is not necessarily visible. Amazon won't show what they did with our software. So it's not so easy to, you don't get the same virality about the services and the work that you did. And we're a medium-sized company, 40 people, so it applies to us. So it doesn't necessarily apply to anybody. It's important to understand that. So in our case, one of the aspects that was also important is that combining innovation and open source is not so simple. So usually what happens a lot is that open source software allows to redo something that already exists. So you take something that people already want to say, okay, I'm going to do it as open source. We're not exactly in that situation. There are lots of wikis, there are proprietary wikis also, but it's also an innovation. So we have to handle that. And so usually innovations require a lot of funding. So a lot of years where you're educating the market and this is usually requires funding. And so causes the problem of, okay, what about funding? How do you get that funding? So one of the things is that why not get VC funding? So from my point of view, and this is my point of view. So VC funding is great because you can get, with the money, you can do a lot of code. You can do a lot of marketing. It's great, but it changes completely. It potentially changes the objective and the goal of the company. Being a private owner and being owned by the employees makes that we decide what the company's goal is. Once you take VC funding, there is only one goal, make money. Yeah, only one goal. Capitalism is about remunerating investors. So then the question comes in on every decision that you take as a CEO. Am I taking the decision that makes the most money for the company? Even if the other decisions are making money, is it the one that makes the most money? And so the problem causes is open source at some point, allowing you to make the most money. And you ask this question and sometimes the answer will be maybe not. And then you are, let's close and let's do less open source. So for me, there is an issue between the VC funding and open source, and it's not so easy to combine these two aspects. We at some point decided no VC funding. So as a company, we're in a different type of problem. Our problem is not that we don't have money and that we have to see how we handle this problem of how you make money and how you remunerate your investors and still be open source. Our problem is how do we still be open source and survive? And it's a different problem, but there's still this problem that comes, how do you make money and be open source? So my take is that with VC funding there is a risk that open source becomes secondary and that progressively the software becomes less and less open. However, I have to recognize that big companies or companies funded by VC are creating huge amount of open source code and that it's great for the community. The code is there. Once it's there, it cannot be taken back. It's just that there is a few risks about how it will evolve later and exactly how it works. So there is a paradox of open source when running a company. So the paradox is company needs to pay salaries. So if 40 employees, they're employees like in any other companies and they are okay, how is my pay evolving? This other company would pay me more. What do we do about it? What's the market price? We have these discussions with our employees and so it's not something that is simple and well we need to be an employer that pays the salaries and that is competitive also on the market. We cannot sell directly what we give. So if it's given, it's hard to sell it. So we have to sell something different than what we give. So we cannot make money directly from the software provided for free. So I don't say that we cannot sell what is open source. I said we cannot sell what we gave. It will be important a bit later in what I present. So as I said the company's interest could be that maximizing profit could mean not doing as much open source. And the community interest would be that we give as much to the community as possible. So we give more to the community. So I believe that in the end the community and the company's interest are that it works. So there is some middle ground that needs to be found. If the company cannot make money, we won't be able to invest anymore in the software. If we don't give to the community, the community won't help us being known. So there is a common interest that both we are able to make money out of what we do and the community gets as much as possible from that software. So now when we look at this paradox is okay, what happens with clients? How do clients perceive open source? So what we found is that enterprise clients, they don't care that much about open source. Some do. So you can have some clients that say for I don't know security reason or we won't only open source software in our company. But most often companies like open source because it's cheaper, which is not a good reason. It's an interesting reason for the company. But from our point of view, this is not why we do open source software. We're not do open source software so that it's cheaper. We do open source software so that it's open source. So that other people can participate and it can evolve and it can stay and it can survive and it can blossom in other software later. So that there is this common creation. And so most companies are interested in open source because it's cheaper. So there is this difficulty. And one of the difficulties that is really strong is, well, if I don't need the support contract, for example, I have an engineer that can support the software. Why should I pay for support contracts? And if we don't have a support contract, we have less money to fund the development of the software. So now we have companies that understand it and play along. So we have companies that will take a contract even though they don't really need it because they want to support the development of the software. But so we have this issue where we have to find this balance and find ways to get the clients to participate. So if the client contributes, then there is no problem. It's not so easy for clients to contribute. We're trying to make Amazon contribute, but it's not so easy. Amazon help us a lot because they paid development. But Amazon didn't pay support contracts because they don't need it. And actually it's even worse than that. They don't need it, but they don't want it because they want to do everything inside their company. So an example, for example, this is actually quite recent. It's a guy that told me, well, he tried our cloud service and he said, ah, this won't work for me. I will immediately remove my subscription. So software, you want me to pay you 150 euros per month to host my content? Go figure. It's like he didn't think one minute who's actually built that software that is open source. So it's like, oh, it's open source, so it's free. We are hosted for free. I don't know, hosted for as cheap as you can. So it doesn't really try to understand how it works, how this open source software existed initially, et cetera. So we have regularly people that call us and they would like the software to be free, but they would like the services to be free. They even made that we did an April 1st joke where we said we would give out free services. And so what we believe is that business people need to understand open source. So now how do you handle this? So this problem of software should be open source. Everything we do should be open source internally. We have these discussions. And on the other side, how do we make money? And so one of the things we learned over the years is that we need business people inside the company that understands well how open source works and what the open source objective is. So for example, some business people, they like the idea that, okay, open source is great to promote the software, but they don't really care about open source, there's no suspects at all. And they usually, lots of marketing people, they used to actually make the decisions in the company. And so here they make the decisions. In our company, when we brought some marketing people in the company, they wanted to make the decision. And then the developer said, no, no, no, we don't want to do that. It doesn't work with the community. It's not going to be a problem. It's not going to be okay. And so we need to discuss with the community to decide if we do the feature, for example. So there are discussions about the leadership inside the company that is different than in a traditional company. So in many companies, marketing is leading. In our company, it's actually more the techies that are leading. So the business people need to learn how to interact with the community. And you need to not take the benefits of open source for granted. And one of the things that is interesting is that business people need to spend the time to educate clients about open source. So we need to educate the clients. So I'll explain the example. So one thing is, for example, one of the things that didn't work in our company is we tried to make a separate package. So enterprise package of X-Wiki. And we failed because it was not easy for the users to transition from the free and open source package to the paying package. So it was creating a lot of complexities and customers would not really understand what would be going on. So what we did is we changed to a strategy. We changed our strategy to paying modules. We're not completely there, but we will be working with paying modules. Another thing about education, one of the things that worked well for us is to decide that all services would be more expensive if you don't have a support contract. So we tell, and this is the first thing we say to many clients that contact us for services is that, okay, if you have a support contract, it's 1,000 euro. If you have no support contracts, it's 1,500 euro. And so by doing that, we're starting the discussion about the fact that it's important for us to get a support contract. And this is an act of education to educate the customers that, okay, this development is not free. We have people that are developing the open source software. Yeah, I'll come to that very quickly. Another thing that is very important is from our point of view is to keep the community separate from the company. So at Xwiki, we have really two sets of rules, what the company does and what the community does. Everything in the community is voted and it's open and it's done in public. And the company makes its decision. However, there is one thing that we don't do so well at Xwiki. For example, we chose the same name. And so it could be better to not choose the same name. It could be better to not choose the same name. We did it because it helps us really for the business. It really helps us for the business to have the same name. But to have better separation between community and the company, it's separating the name. Another thing we'd like to do if we could is creating a foundation. But it's not so simple. It takes time and at our size it's difficult to do. So another aspect is that the open source developers and the people from open source need to understand the business problems. Many developers, they don't get really in the money aspect. But they still get a salary. So you need to educate the people to understand that they cannot get it all. So if you want that what you do is open source, if you want that it's done in an open way, you need to think about the consequences for the company. Can the company make money with that approach? If the company makes less money maybe the pay needs to be lower. So you need, and so the open source people need to understand the problems and maybe about the decisions that are made for doing business. What we do as open source, what we do as paying modules is also actually what we do as free software and what we do as paying software. I'll come to that. So it was difficult in our company to make the decision for paying modules. So when we started saying we're going to make paying modules, it was difficult for some of the employees that are very open source to say how did it work. And even when I said look there's still going to be open source these paying modules. They're just not going to be built. So we're not going to build them and give them for free to people. If you want them as open source, go to GitHub, build it yourself, install it yourself. But if you want it through our App Store, pay for it. So it's actually an interesting approach. The software is open source but you don't get it for easy. You don't get it so easily. So we still keep the open source approach but we have paying modules. It's also for our point of view an act of dedication. But the first reaction of the developers say yeah but somebody will build them. They say no no nobody will build them because they will understand why it's important that we can sell software. And if the software is so popular that there are so many people that want to come and build the software then we will have more contributors. That means it will work better. So paying modules, we decided to launch paying modules. And this is actually a big move for us and it's something that is complicated. But if you look at many of the open source companies they have either an enterprise package or paying modules. We think that the paying module approach is good because it really keeps the main open source software completely open and free. And the paying modules are separate. They come on top and they also allow to move from one to the other so they allow for an open source user to start with the software and then use paying modules. So one thing I finished with that is that one of the issues with all this thing about companies and communities is that there's many companies doing open source. There's many software that are open source. How do you actually recognize whether it's a good approach that is community oriented that is ethical? How do you recognize an approach that might end up in any way? We're going to move away from open source and take the money and run. So for me, there's a few things that people need to look at. Is the community open? That's really important. So is there an open community? Is it run in a way that is inclusive for participants? How much code do they actually produce? And how is the evolution of that quantity of code? So how much commitment to open source there is? And then is it only about the development side? Is the open source aspect about the development side? Or is it also about the whole business? So do you hear only the developers talk about open source or do you hear the whole company talk about open source? And then try to analyze how is the long term commitment about open source of the company. Thank you. 10 minute break. So we do have time for questions even though we're at the top of the talk. So yes, nice person in the back. What is your view on the subscription model where Red Hat uses? Can you just repeat the question? Yeah, so what is my view on the subscription model that Red Hat uses? So what Red Hat uses is they have Fedora on one side and they have Red Hat software on the other side. So if we take Linux because they also do a lot of other stuff. They kind of separate both. So they deliver clients with Red Hat. So it looks like an enterprise package but however Red Hat is fully open source. So that's actually, it's similar to what we do with the paying modules to what we want to do with the paying modules that are open source but we sell them. So people can have access to the source but we sell them. We don't give it for free so they don't build it and they only build Fedora. You want complete, you want a free build. You go get Fedora, you want a paying build, you go get Red Hat. So it's similar to that model and it protects open source. It protects open source quite well so I find it very positive. I think they have an interesting balance. For contracts, I'm kind of curious what people say about open source. It's a better way to try and get companies to, it's a spend money on an open source project knowing that it helps it instead of, for example, asking for donations. So I'm just not sure exactly what that really means but I see what you've said through the talk that you can reduce costs for custom features. For example, if you have a long run support contract, is there anything else? Do you get a certain amount of support hours per month? No, so support in our case, it's a fixed price which depends on the type of installation number of users and things like that and it's a fixed price. You can technically call as much as you want. We're going to give you guarantee. It's more like an insurance in reality. Like you have a serious problem, we're going to fix it. We lose your data, we're going to help you recover it. You have a problem with the feature, we're going to fix the feature. So we don't want to do by the hour support because we believe that this doesn't help fund the software. So we prefer the approach of a fixed price, fixed price support contract that you will pay every year and then you can call our support. I have a follow-up question. I'm just curious, how do you prevent people from abusing like just calling you constantly all the time? So they don't, so it's okay. No, actually support is the greatest business you can get in. It's just a question of price in the end because maybe that might not be true if you do a 100 euro support contract. We don't do a 100 euro support contract. We do 5,000, 10,000, 20,000, 50,000. So it's really a question of the amount of money. But for example, on our cloud service, we have cloud at 100 euro and we have clients that abuse. Now we try to look at it on average. In the end, what counts is on average. And on cloud, on average, it's fine. So even though the prices are much lower, then what we have for big enterprises, it's good. I have a lightning talk about the tips and tricks to finance open source project. I talk a bit about support at 620, I think. Yeah, that's an approach. But I'll quickly take more questions in the hallway. Sure. Excellent. Can we have the microphone back? Yes, yes, yes.