Which Open Source protocol should your startup use ?, What Should startup do?

Which Open Source protocol should your startup use ?, What Should startup do?

Editor's note: This article is from tomasz tunguz. The Chinese version is compiled by Tiandi Zhuhai sub-rudder.

Once you decide to introduce an open-source library to your product, or your product is an open-source software product, you must consider which of the many open-source protocols is the most suitable for you.

Currently, open-source protocols are widely used in the industry, but the three most popular ones are GPL, Apache, and MIT. One thing I have always been curious about is the pattern of the open-source protocols they have chosen among many startups that use/build open-source software, they are also used to withdraw from investment attraction and investors. For example, does venture capital decide to withdraw cash before the IPO to find the next startup to invest. Let's take a look at whether we can find some clues to help you make reference when choosing relevant protocols for your open-source products.

Black Duck Software is a company engaged in code scanning checks to determine that these Software uses the correct open source authorization protocol, every year, they will publish the top 20 open-source protocols they have investigated and studied in open-source projects.

From the table above, we can see that 42% of open source project developers prefer to use the GPL open source protocol series, While MIT is 20%, and Apache accounts for 16%, which is the top three data items. However, what you will see is that enterprises that use the Apache open-source Protocol have obtained the largest investment quota out of proportion to their usage, that is to say, investors prefer those startups that use the Apache protocol.

As you can see, Apache open-source Protocol projects only account for 16 of all open-source projects, but have received 50% of venture capital to promote the commercialization of their projects. In fact, this data is largely due to the promotion of Cloudera, Hortonworks, and MapR, a data management software and service provider that promotes the commercialization of Hadoop today.

The MIT protocol is a bit thunderous. In 20% of open-source projects, developers chose the MIT protocol as their code open-source Protocol. However, in commercial projects, the MIT Protocol project only raised 1% of venture capital. In contrast, projects with the GPL protocol account for 42% of projects and earn 37% of the investment amount.

For withdrawal (exits: As described at the beginning of the article, withdrawal is also called withdrawal. For example, venture capital chooses to exit after the IPO to find the next startup to invest), including through mergers and acquisitions and IPO, projects using the GPL Protocol still have overwhelming advantages, it has created more than $6 billion in liquidity. The Apache project, however, created $2 billion in liquidity. In the past, this may be due to the fact that the GPL protocol came out 10 years earlier than the Apache protocol. (1989 vs. 2000 ). In fact, among the three largest open-source companies so far, Sourcefire (2.4 billion), Novell ($2.1 billion), and MySQL (1 billion), without exception, all adopt the GPL protocol. Here MySql and Novel both existed before the Apaceh protocol was born (So what else can they use without GPL ?).

In fact, by commercializing Hadoop and other commercial start-up projects using the Apache open source protocol, such as Cassandra, it is very likely that in the next five years, the company will surpass those that adopt the GPL protocol in the "withdrawal.

In terms of intellectual property rights, there is actually a fundamental difference between various protocols here. I will not elaborate on this article. I believe you will soon be able to understand this. In general, the Apache protocol is relatively novel. Enterprises Adopting this protocol will obtain more venture capital investment from the data point of view. However, it is precisely because it is relatively new that enterprises adopting the Protocol have not yet seen any substantial return.

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