Best practices and use cases to align open source initiatives with business goals

[anajsana]

• Recommendations for adopting open source in businesses (e.g Address clustering suppliers to assess their open source-first commitment).

• Share neutral collaboration examples, such as LF Energy’s, OpenSTEF, etc where open source adoption led to business success

[SDKAAA]

I see from the size of the issue is that it is Large; therefore how large should it go?
Do we want to be more academic and do some interviews with identified usecases' suppliers? maybe a survey? thoughts?
Then there is the question on how to structure this? do we start by enumerating, then grouping and meanwhile trying to summarize the most important parts of the successes of the usecases?

for the sake of not forgetting a few usecases from the top of my head:

• I find the Red Hat 'upstream first' approach worth mentioning (post from 2016 but still valid where they spent at the time almost $2 billion to acquire open and closed source technologies and make sure they're freely available to the community)
• 12 Successful Big Companies Using Odoo ERP from 2022 but shows the success of both Open Source business and Businesses using open source and open source businesses.
• Passbolt is a usecase of true success in open source business (single platform to manage the entire passwords lifecycle)

also, something worth checking, at FOSDEM, there is going to be a talk about "Build a Great Business on Open Source without Selling Your Soul" by Robert Hodges and here's what he's proposing:

A profitable business is one of the best protections for commercial open source projects and communities that depend on them. Our talk draws on the experience of companies that pulled it off to explain how to do it for your own projects. We’ll discuss commercial models that actually work, giving back to the community, and gracefully collecting money for free software. We'll also discuss topics for larger projects like foundations and taking VC funding. It is possible to balance a strong belief in open source communities with making payroll every two weeks. We've done it and will share our secrets.