I wrote recently that the “five ages of vendor-led open source revenue strategies” I’d come up with wasn’t suitable for vendors that build a business around community-led projects.

I recently met up with Ian Skerrett, director of marketing at the Eclipse Foundation and while we were chatting about community engagement, amongst other things, he showed me a graphic that demonstrates why engagement with an open source community has its own five-stage process.

The five-stage process matches with what we’ve been hearing from a number of vendors recently as we’ve examined their attitudes towards open source. Some are further along the process than others while others have skipped a stage (or more accurately completed a stage in private before publicly announcing their engagement with open source).

The five stages, as I would describe them, are as follows: