 Room talk Lightning talk room, sorry So I would like you to welcome our next speaker Ludovic Dubost. I was going to talk to you about how to finance open source projects Yeah It's good. Okay. Hello so I'm Ludovic Dubost. I've created xWiki and I've been working At xWiki and on xWiki for 14 years xWiki is a company that is bootstrapped so self-financed and it's owned by its employee and it has grown to two million euros revenue Quickly what we do we do a wiki software for enterprises. We have 5,000 installs around the world It was presented by Vincent actually an hour ago in in this room And it's a software that is recognized by large companies. We have Amazon using it worldwide for for all its employees We also created actually a second open source software, which is CripPad, CripPad.fr its particularity is that it's a Secure a real-time online editing. So it's actually a bit Google Docs But the data is encrypted on the server. So the server has no knowledge of what you are editing It's actually quite interesting technology So I'm going to talk about how we I'm missing something here Yeah, okay let me reduce a bit the window and Because it doesn't Show up fully Okay, let me reduce Sorry up. Okay. Sounds good here like that Okay, so how? How to finance an open source project? So this is going to be our experience doesn't Doesn't apply to everybody and there might be different cases So the first is raise money and actually well, this is this talk is about avoiding to raise money I personally feel that if you raise money there the op there isn't incompatibility or difficulties with the open source concept and a fight between The capitalistic way of making a maximum amount of money and the the open source way of sharing what you do with your community so this talk is about Tricks and tips and ways to finance that don't involve raising money So first first tip is Google some of code There's actually a stand now Here we actually participate to the first one in 2005 and this is has been a great Great start for xwiki. It allowed us to have Students working on the code. This is how also I met Surge you who was a student in Romania and this is how we got in the end to employ 20 people in Romania now So it's been a big thing for us To to participate to the Google some of code. We also participate to Google code in this year Another tip is research projects. So just before there was a presentation about the European community funding Funding bug bounties. Well, the European community also funds project and open source is an interesting argument when you when you are Looking for public funding the fact that you're going to share your results with everybody makes it an argument We also have the chance as a French company to have also significant funding for French projects collaborative projects and we also have something called credit or research and all this is actually Similar to getting money from venture capital So it's been a multimillion euros that we invested in creating our software There is tomorrow a talk of getting funding through the hyper connected society society in the decentralization dev room So I can only encourage companies or people that create open source to candidate to projects Service so service is a is an interesting solution, especially in the start because it allows you to do It's not so difficult. You send the software out and people won't help to implement it So it's natural to do it at the same time It has issues because when you when you rely on service in in terms of growing a company It's more difficult because you need to hire more people It's not so easy to manage working on the software and working for clients And so there there are some difficulties there. So it's for us It's a great way to bring new support clients, but it's not the end goal the end goal is to is to Get more direct revenue from the product we built It's there is also a tip which is trying to co-finance a new feature So basically proposing to multiple clients to co-pay for getting a new feature in the system and a tip that we use is tell Tell clients that you have to pay more for service if you don't have a support contract So it's very important for us to get support contracts. I will mention it in the next slide This is what creates recurrent revenue and with which we can fund developers that are developing open source software and Well now some companies you know, I don't really need the I don't really need the Support so why should I pay for it? So you tell that I pay for it because it helps us make the software better over time But it might not be an enough argument to go see the boss and say we have to pay for the software that is free And so we we say okay look you want services you want a day to help you It's 1500 euro if you don't have a support contract It's thousand euro if you don't if you have a support contract And it's also good because it starts a discussion about the fact that the support contract is important for sustaining the software development Enterprise support this is what we're looking for most And one thing we have done recently is actually push for getting three-year contracts So different pricing if you take a contract for three years, then if you take a contract for one year this creates more More sustainability, and we have more visibility on our revenue. So that has here has been also quite interesting and and we So another tip is to have different levels to adapt to the different types of customers that they can be One thing we don't do is we refuse to do support by the hour Like you want only an hour of support. No, we don't do that. We want a fixed contract for the year Cloud so cloud is very interesting now it it's it's interesting because it's more international So service it's usually the customers that are close to you that will come to you It's more difficult to sell service at somebody at the end of the world With cloud it's there are more possibilities there However, it's significant infrastructure work to have a good good cloud system a payment system complexity with payments all around Europe or around the world But it allows to address smaller clients. It's more difficult to address smaller clients with service and support With cloud you have a way to address small client It's difficult to set up a good pricing strategy. So for us cloud is still low in our revenue It's like well, we have half our revenue that is linked to clients that are hosted, but direct online payment People coming to the website say I want to hosting it's we hosted xwiki. It's only it's only a couple percent of our revenue today And Enterprise package so we fail that this actually so many open source big companies that raise money They have an enterprise package and an open source package So actually we have not we tried that and it was really as a small company this created confusion What I believe is that it needs to be easy for a customer for a user that is using the open source software to come and Purchase something more and the enterprise package was creating a situation where well you it's not the same package as the one that is Free so it was complicated and it created confusion that was not as good for us Paying extension this is actually a direction to where we go today The reason we go for that is because it's the same as cloud we can go for more for international So we can get revenue for international and what we believe is that We can give a reason for people to ask money from their boss to pay for the open source software so Sometimes it's it's more a question of it's hard for the in it. We are an enterprise software So we talk many many times to developers or technical people inside the companies that like open source software And they were maybe it's not a problem to give money back to the open source provider But when they go see the boss the boss says Well, do we have to pay for this and the boss says well the guy said well, no, it's not necessary We don't have to it's so we can use it for free and then they go, okay So handle it for free because when the boss wants to make economies he He has an occasion to pay less he pays left So we believe that it can give a reason to to buy one thing is that we're going to keep these extensions open source So there's if people really want them for free they can go to to github and Build them themselves and install them themselves, but we're going to make it a bit more difficult to get it for free and One new things we're going to try is for Crip pad Crip pad is a is more a cloud software So it's a website that you can use it for free And it's also an open source software. You can install it But so when people in we build the payment system when you reach more than 50 megabytes of content on on the main server Crip pad or they far and Well, we have left we have left this the code for paying in the version that people would install on their own instances So people have to actually deactivate Directly the limitations to 50 megabytes if they install Crip pad on their own server And what we want to do is propose if you're hosting Crip pad. Well, let's do revenue sharing So let's let you also let you use a pay potentially and we're going to share the revenue with you So this is something new and actually we have a first user in Greek in Greece That is going to do that and set let let the system like that And so to finish methods within try yet a crowd funding donations So donations we don't believe it too much. I think it can be good. It can be okay and donations advertisement that can be an interesting approach for software that are Main mainstream for users so user software not company software. We don't believe too much in donations from companies and so advertisement same thing and we also want to try selling online training Not only because of the revenue it can do big because it can help people be more successful with the software And so crowdfunding is something that we find interesting, but it's also Requires a significant amount of work to launch This presentation was done with script pad. So if you want to try Crip pad go to Crip pad afar and Ex-Wiki you can try it on you can also download it or try it on the cloud. I have two minutes for questions Yes Yes, so can I explain the model extension model? So Ex-Wiki has an app store So you can install extensions in Ex-Wiki. So these are applications or or features So connect to Google apps connect to Microsoft Office 365. We have actually already 25 extensions. We maintain Over the the the basic Ex-Wiki software. So actually if you compare Ex-Wiki to Confluence and Confluence not only it's actually you have to pay for Confluence More than the support contracts of Ex-Wiki, but you also have to pay for every extension in Ex-Wiki So what we do is that we actually our price our 25 extensions Are at with Ex-Wiki and Ex-Wiki support contract are at the price of conference with no extensions And then you have to pay for every extension in Confluence So we're going to make some some of these extensions today are free So we have lots of extensions that are free. We're going to make them paying They're still open source if people really want them for free they can get them But they in in the extension manager of Ex-Wiki They will see paying extension and if you buy two or three extensions It would be the same thing to buy the support if you buy the support you get all of them Paying extensions will be recurring and already recurring. So right now we have two paying extensions there per year So it's a per year pricing cloud is recurring also our support contracts are recurring So it's a per year pricing. We have no we sell we never sell Licenses so not in determining licenses always yearly Yeah, and this is what that also what I mentioned about the three year trying to get from the clients Long-term commitment. This is important because so it can be scary for the client Usually they don't always take it the first year, but the second year they go for the for the long-term commitment Very often when they feel safe basically 10 seconds. Thank you