Jay Lyman has hit the nail on the head on the 451 CAOS blog regarding the open core debate. The primary reason vendors are exploring open core as a model is because customers have asked for it.

With Likewise Open we provide the features needed by our entire community, from individual users to enterprise customers with thousands of seats. The primary functionality, connecting to and authenticating against Microsoft’s Active Directory, is fully open source and benefits everybody. We’re pleased to be able to offer Likewise Open under the LGPL/GPL, and to know that this is working for more than 50,000 customers around the world.

Our enterprise customers have the added value of Likewise Enterprise, which adds a number of features to Likewise Open, such as directory migration, reporting and auditing tools, and single sign-on for enterprise applications. The added functionality in Enterprise benefits a very specific segment of our community, and we work closely with our enterprise customers to ensure we provide value here. At the same time, we work hard at making Likewise Open a solution that is robust and updated simultaneously (if not ahead of) Likewise Enterprise.

Simon Phipps and other open source advocates are right to watch for companies that would use the term “open source” abusively or deceptively. But this does not include all open core strategies. Phipps does many of the vendors (and their customers) offering open core solutions an extreme disservice by painting open core as some kind of nefarious lock in scheme. The converse is true: Many open core vendors are providing functionality that benefits an enormous user base whether they do business with the vendor or not.

Open core, when done right, provides value to the open source community and consumers of the proprietary software simultaneously. It may not be the ultimate ideal for those like Phipps who spend their time criticizing open source businesses that don’t achieve their desired level of software licensing purity, but it’s a workable solution that addresses the needs of the customer, community, and vendor.