The audience, welcome to the third talk on this topic, how to stay sustainable on
the open source, Marco and Asaki, welcome, give him a warm-out applause place.
Thank you.
So, who pays your bills?
That's a very good question, and it's something that I want to explore a little bit today,
slightly anecdotically.
So, don't take me, it's more out of experience than there's not big theory behind this.
It's what I lived in the last 13, 14 years.
As you can see, I kind of have a couple of hats that are related to geography.
I'm a geography, I'm a geography originally.
So, I live in this fantastic bubble that is the geoword.
We always get to deal with data that is outside.
We get to go in the mountains that was where they dreamt of at the beginning.
Reality looks a bit different now, but still that's what I care deeply about.
And usually, I keep talks in a geobubble.
Now, for these, I had a couple of two three slides at the beginning to kind of give you a background of what I'm talking about.
I don't know who of you knows QGIS.
Okay, that makes it much easier for me.
QGIS is kind of your main tool to make maps in the open word source.
So, in the open source words, sorry.
It's really big we're talking about 20 million openings per month of people that are actually telling us that they are doing it.
So, low estimates.
And then the next actor of this story is Q field, which is something I invented back in 2011.
And it is a mobile application for QGIS.
It allows us or it allows people to go out in the field and digitize data that they care about out there.
I don't know.
Their cables running underground or they favor it mushroom peaking sides.
Or you really have this wide range of use that are happening.
And then there is a company, which is the company that I found 10 years ago, which is called OpenGIS, that is behind one of these behind of Q field and one of the main contributor of QGIS.
I will talk a lot about those three examples because they are very linked to each other in very interlink to my life as well obviously.
And because they are very, very, very relevant to the question who pays your bills.
And this was when I was finished with university university, university asked me to go and in Zurich, the university department of geography asked me to go and give a seminar on entrepreneurship and open source.
I was super happy I gave it a couple of years.
And one year there was a guy in the back of the room that asked, I asked in the end of them, seminar like any more questions anybody that really would like to know something that it's not clear yet.
And he raises and he says, well, who pays your bills?
And I was like, well, that's a very, very, very interesting question.
I wasn't by myself back then. OpenGIS was one man show doing some developments in QGIS doing some consultancy doing teaching and so on and so on.
And then moment was like, okay, well, I'm going to try to answer you obviously.
And I did try to answer him.
Turns out this guy, Matthias, is now the CEO of OpenGIS.
We created the company together from like my single entity thing to something a bit bigger.
And by asking something that most people don't like asking.
Most people are kind of afraid in open source.
We have this very, very bad tendency of thinking that money is something we should not talk about.
And that's really wrong because we are working.
We are doing cool things as well in the evenings and volunteer and for passion and everything.
And that's really good.
And that's why I like this environment so much.
But we're also giving a lot of value.
We've seen it this morning in the keynote, how much value we're producing.
And we just need to be aware of that.
We are working.
And that's good.
That's okay.
There's nothing that in that at all.
And this question shaped obviously our future.
Because in the origin and how I came to start OpenGIS at the very beginning is because I didn't want to be abandoned.
In in in GIS and geographic information system there is another proprietary product or company that is like a four billion company revenue per year.
That at university gives you all these CDs back then still with all the software you.
That's no, sorry.
That gives you all the software you can imagine every single feature functionality that you can use during your studies.
But when you're finished with your studies and you want to start a company while you're first thing that you will do is crack that
property or a sector and I'm not abandoned.
I didn't want to do that.
I didn't want to be to have my first professional activity being stealing.
And this is how I moved.
Well, that's what it is.
That's why I started looking into open source back in 2006 and I found QGIS.
And then realizing with time did we have challenges.
Who fans us?
The choice to me.
I really like the environment we've been.
But I think that the free software foundation did a huge mistake with the naming because this creates us as companies and as containers.
This thing that free means four free as in beer and free as in open and in freedom.
It is just making life really difficult to tell people that it is not free as in beer and people do not understand what that means.
We heard this morning that you get a browser that is for free without cost but you are the cost.
And then we need to go out and explain that over and over again and pity because the concept is fantastic.
The naming was suboptimal and unfortunately weren't there a lot.
And then the concept of cathedral or bizarre.
What I think and what I want to talk to you about today is that there are three things that we need to balance.
So when we have a project and we are running it and want to make sustainable we need to look at three major point.
What we want to talk about or project the community and the business.
How do they combine how do I see them and what do I think makes sense.
First of all, you need a product or a project that makes sense.
That is helpful for people and that is tailored for people.
And this is what I see as the brain.
If you don't have something that is focused on user needs.
I don't think it will grow much.
If you want to grow something, you need to think about your users.
In QGAs and Q field, we are solving problems that were there.
QGAs was started 22 years ago by somebody that needed to be able to look at vectors, polygons that were stored in PostgreSQL.
It started QGAs and now it is amazing too.
Q field I started it because I didn't want to be inside all the time and I knew the data are outside and I wanted something mobile to run on my Android device.
So that is what I started.
And here I think is really important to consider also how you treat engineers in an open-source project.
I like to across a lot. If people want something to happen, they can make it happen.
But they also have to make it.
Then your product or your project need a vision.
If you are not telling your user where you are going, they don't know what you stand for.
With Q field, we know that we want to empower people to map and understand their word.
That is what we are telling them. This is what we trust. This is where we are going.
This is where Q field wants to go. It is going to be the tool for you.
That helps you doing these things. With QGAs, we want to be spatial without compromise.
I know it is marketing but language matters. People react to whether you tell them if you are saying the truth obviously.
These are things that we care deeply about in those two projects.
These are things that we want those project to represent.
Second element, the community. I see that as the heart.
You might have a big brain and be super smart but if there is no heart pumping blood, there is nothing happening.
Here is really your users, your contributors.
Take care not to think only of developers as your community. There are many projects that automatically see the developers are the community.
Yes, but not only. Everybody that translates your project, everybody that helps you push your project.
Even companies that are pushing it out, all those should be part of your community.
There is one currency and that is trust.
You do things not in a two trustworthy manner, you lose your trust, your project community starts going away.
We heard this morning, what has she called it? That is a rather big step towards losing trust, but the community moved to the next project.
You might have a heartbeat, you might be very smart, but without legs, you are not really going forward.
Here is what I really see the development.
Now, in QGIS, we will see later, it is really this buzzer model where multiple companies are involved in Q-field.
There is more one company, but we will see more in detail there.
Here is really how the product is developed. What kind of services are there around?
Is there a monetization model that works?
We have partnership, sponsorship, donations, and so on, and so on.
These are all things that you need to go and look into detail.
As I said, there are different models.
I don't say that there is one model that works well or another that doesn't work.
In QGIS, we really have this vibrant buzzer, where you have 10 different companies committing to core.
What they have been building for their clients.
You have volunteers committing to core.
There is a process upfront where if you want to do big changes, you need to submit an enhancement proposal.
So, this very grassroots bottom-up kind of complete openness.
It's super nice. It makes one thing very difficult, and that is steering requirements.
You can not, or you can much more hardly say we want to go in that direction,
because the founding is coming from clients.
The bottom from volunteers at the bottom that are just bringing up features,
and it's really difficult to manage which way you want to go.
You're just more going with the flow wherever your user are actually willing to put effort into and to finance the development.
On the Q-field side,
we have chosen, or I have chosen back then, a bit of a different path,
where the company that I created, OpenGIS, is pushing the project, is a GPL project.
And we try to mirror everything that is in QGIS,
so the openness and other companies can contribute to, but there is much more of a project given direction by OpenGIS.
In this whole story, going from who pays your bills,
where I was by myself, skiing mostly every morning and working in the afternoon,
to now a group of 40 people,
I learned that there are things that are very important in open source,
but also in business.
If you just see, if you're got all the business part of it,
it's going to be difficult to build a company that constantly sustained projects in open source.
We are one of the main sponsors of QGIS itself.
We have five core developers that keep on investing way more than what we heard this morning,
like this half a day per 20 developers.
We have seven developers and they are investing seven like their time in QGIS.
So it's, you can build something that really pushes projects forward
if you put passion into what you're doing.
I've always been very passionate about my work.
I say along the way, I had seven different jobs, 20 heads and a thousand decisions.
In case you are considering creating a company,
to me, the biggest step was hiring someone.
That is something that was really hard.
The first employee is suddenly somebody that you need to pay,
and that you need to be responsible for that was a big step,
but absolutely awarded to get where we got now.
As I say, we invest a lot.
But now the interesting part.
How did we finance those projects?
How did we get Q field from my last three university credits
as a Google summer of code into an application?
The now has half a million active users per month over two million downloads.
The first thing we did was we got clients interested and asked
what does it need to do?
What would you be willing to pay me for making this better?
Up to two or three years ago, that was the main revenue of the project.
It was really going out, building up features in Q field,
building up things that were needed.
Obviously, in the early stages of software, that's much easier,
because there's a lot of things that you need to do,
so it's relatively easy to find somebody that will finance some functionality.
What we also did was we were cross financing development,
the consulting, the teaching,
so we were giving courses on Q field,
and that would generate revenue that we would then reinvest in development,
consulting the same thing.
And because we believed in the project a lot,
we did internal investments also from the company,
from other revenue streams that we had.
Now, after that, that doesn't scale.
I mean, you need to go out, you need to find clients,
you need to have developers that always ties
into somebody as dictating the roadmap.
And that's okay.
But there are, I think, much nicer way to go,
and that is when we created Q field cloud,
which is also an MIT licensed open source product
that we offer also as a paid service.
And there, we were able to start building
of other where revenue is coming in.
We can take it and use it for development the way that we want.
We can start suddenly have a roadmap.
We can go in at the direction we want.
We can ask our users what would you like,
what is the most important thing,
but we don't have to ask them,
can you please pay for it?
And that's a huge difference,
because we can suddenly just listen to all the users,
not only to the one that also happened to have some cash around.
And we're enforced that by response or sheep and donations.
What made it a success is that from the first day,
it was really about what is needed.
I think that's really key.
Bazaar energy,
cathedral clarity is something
that I know some people don't like at all.
Do you have the cathedral model in there?
I like the lot, personal choices.
Because I know how I am,
I know that it will not turn into a way,
and it's GPS.
So, tied feedback loop and invested in convenience,
because what I think,
if you want to take something from my talk today,
this is a slide you need to take care of.
Monatize on convenience,
never, ever, on freedoms.
All we do is out there.
People can take it, run it,
everything for themselves.
There's no problem with me for them doing that.
What I want to be able to offer is for somebody,
to very easily be able to pay a service.
So, that we get money back for development.
Because by monetizing on convenience,
you are not touching anybody's freedoms.
You are actually allowing anybody to use
world-class software with a little bit of investment by themselves.
They need to invest their time,
because they need to run their service themselves.
We even go further,
and we offer a free, like,
you can, if you're doing community work,
or if you're just doing small work for yourself,
you're just used to give it a call for free.
But the fact that we are allowing people
to just use the service,
a paid service is really, really important,
because that allows us to sustainably maintain the old project.
The other thing we try to do at OpenGIS
as a company is to connect the dots.
Also, convenience, big enterprises,
like things that just work for them.
So, try to connect the dots.
Obviously, we support all the project.
We even created a sustainability initiative for QGS,
even though we are just a company.
What we say is,
every single support contract we do with a client.
We take all the time that the client doesn't use during the year.
We give it back to this sustainability initiative.
That gives us three or four hundred hours per year of clients,
hours that are just paid by clients,
but we invest them upstream.
And the other thing we do is that we say,
for every support contract we do,
we also put in a half a day of work in the initiative.
So, we do this kind of work.
Because in this triangle,
you need to balance the three things.
You do need to create the balance that,
or maintain the balance that creates sustainability.
Because if you wait one too much,
then you are super commercial.
Community goes away.
You lose the community.
The project is gone.
If you do too much community,
and you don't have money,
then you are in trouble.
Your maintainers burn out.
If you do too much product,
that don't have money,
and don't have community.
Well, you're in trouble yourself.
So, it's really very difficult to manage these balance.
And to me, the lessons that I learned
was really first I need value.
And then I can monetize sustainably.
I need to diversify the revenue streams,
and I need to keep upstream healthy.
Because if I don't invest in upstream,
I'm cutting my own legs.
How we mitigate the risks,
build teams instead of single persons,
have reserves and diversification.
If we keep on contributing upstream,
the possibility to have force is much smaller.
And obviously, that's paramount for us
is big, open source citizens.
Because open source is a real business opportunity,
which fantastic side effects,
I keep getting picture like this saying,
thank you for Qfield,
because now we can manage our forest,
and it cost us nothing.
And on the other side,
I get businesses using it to say,
like our super efficient,
really cool, how can we sustain,
and I just see the money coming in from here,
and going out the other side,
as a product,
feels a little bit robin hoodie,
and I really like that a lot.
Takeaways,
as I said before,
whatever you rely on, that's basic.
Having a good community pays back in the end,
because they are turning into our main ambassadors now,
and sustainability is not magic,
is something you need to keep investing time in,
it loops and it sustain itself.
If you want to know more about QJS Qfield
in my hometown, actually,
that's where I live in October.
We have a big conference,
and not as big as for STEM.
Come by and decide that.
Thank you very much.
And if you have any questions,
I think I still have two minutes, three minutes.
APPLAUSE
Many thanks for the inspiring talk.
Questions from the audience.
OK, no question.
Sorry.
Hi, thanks for the talk.
I was wondering if you could clarify
how exactly, I guess,
the structure works between open GIS,
QJS, and Qfield,
as it kind of like open GIS,
it's at the top,
and then the two sort of feet into it,
or how does that interaction look?
So, QJS is a foundation association,
completely separated.
Open GIS is one of the core contributors of QJS.
So, the company, my company,
is one of the main contributor to QJS,
and my company is also the one
that is the lead contributor in Qfield.
And Qfield is QJS core,
with striped all the UI,
and basically with another user interface on top.
But very often when we need something in Qfield,
we can do it in QJS,
and then it comes back because it's part of the,
so we need, I don't know,
a new rendering engine for polygons.
We can do it in QJS,
so the old QJS ecosystem gets it,
and then because we have a QJS core in Qfield,
we get it back.
So, we do a lot of upstream work
instead of do it in Qfield again.
There she is.
So, just to clarify,
when you were saying a contribute upstream,
do you mean contribute upstream to QJS?
Okay, cool.
Yes, when I was talking about upstream
for us, it's clearly QJS.
So, when we need something in Qfield,
and we can,
and it makes sense to do it in QJS,
we do it in QJS.
And even for the upstream,
GDAL posters,
wherever it makes more sense to do,
we try to go,
always go as far up as possible
into things,
because then the effect is much bigger.
Marko,
many thanks,
and small present from the conference,
and please,
another former applause.
Thank you.