Matt Asay, open source blogger for CNET, got some eye-opening feedback from CTOs about their use of open source. As with many other aspects of business, money speaks louder than freedom alone, but freedom isn't a bad bonus.

The whole thing happened at the New York CTO Club, where Matt talked with CTOs from all across the map about open source. What he learned about the way companies use open source might well serve as a model for what to expect if you're planning on offering an open source product:

[The conversations with CTOs] can be summarized as follows: Don't expect code contributions back from enterprise IT, but instead make it easy to financially justify giving open-source communities and companies money, with proprietary add-ons or extensions being the primary mechanism for accomplishing this.

The single thing that struck me the most was the note that CTOs have a perception -- valid or not, it scarcely matters -- that it's difficult and potentially legally thorny for them to contribute code back. They'd rather just contribute money, whether in the form of licensing proprietary bits or just paying for expanded features ("Hey, can you write an Outlook connector for this?"), perhaps as an adjunct to their existing support contracts.

One of the things mentioned as a possibility is a feature-request marketplace for FOSS products, an idea I like a great deal and which deserves to be given wider consideration. It keeps the original FOSS stuff as-is; the technology for the marketplace could easily be built on top of the existing forges and source-exchange venues; and there's clearly a need for it. Example: The SugarCRM folks have SugarExchange, where people can sell commercial add-ons to SugarCRM. They could very easily graft in feature-marketplace functionality, and make use of the existing audiences (both developers and users) to get things rolling.

Is all this likely to change with broader open source adoption, where there's less of a need to create outreach and more automatic give-and-take? I'm guessing the main thing isn't the breadth of adoption alone, but broader knowledge among the right people about the mechanics of an open source endeavor -- including legal departments, who generally seem to be out of the loop on a lot of this. But under it all, I don't see paying people to get what you need ever falling out of favor, no matter what the licensing involved.

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