It may seem odd that a company with such a rich heritage in open source would launch a SAAS service. Some would even incorrectly think this is at odds with the whole open source ethos.
In order for Open Source to be truly successful it must have commercial models behind it that support the community and investments needed to make it as good and better than the alternative proprietary offerings.
SAAS is inherently about the value in the service leveraged on top of the software. Its about providing the support, optimisation, integration and other surrounding services that are needed particularly in the enterprise. The key to keeping it in line with the Open source ethos is to take your learnings and apply them to the community.
This can be in a wide variety of ways, all that add value and support the ecosystem that drive forward Open Source adoption around the globe. My current favorite example is https://www.drupal.org/node/2349801 a super simple Drupal 8 patch, for me small patches like this are the key, becuase this was not done by a developer but one of the team at Drupalcon in amsterdam. The investment in sending team members to Drupalcon and encourgaging them to support in anyway they can from supporting at events or to patching core are all factilated by our SAAS business model.
We have been supporting Open source since before we were even a company and this will continue, we will submit moduels, patches, share learning, provide support whenever and wherever we can. This is embedded in our company ethos as shown by our Core Promise:
“At no point will we now, or ever, put a technical or procedural impediment in any client’s way should they decide to stop using our service. They will be able to gain access to all code required to build an equivalent solution and will always have access to download their content, in a structured format, without the need to engage with us.”
