When Open Source Community Software is Bought by Private Equity

When private equity buys online community platforms, who wins? What about if those platforms were built on open source software? Does the company continue to be a good citizen of the open source community that helped build the product?

History has shown us that it is often the community managers and pros who lose. They might not just lose a good platform though, they might lose their job.

Lincoln Russell has an interesting perspective on this topic. He joined Vanilla Forums, an open source community software platform, as a senior developer in 2011, having already used it for a couple of years. He left the company in 2020, then the director of engineering. Lincoln has continued to use the software. Vanilla Forums was subsequently purchased by Higher Logic, a company lacking a meaningful history of open source contributions.

As a matter of disclosure, both Higher Logic and Vanilla Forums are past sponsors of the show.

Lincoln and I also discuss:

• How Vanilla Forums’ open source ethos shifted over time
• The importance of data migration standards for community software
• Is community software best built by small businesses?

Big Quotes

Your community software provider must answer this (16:38): “The first question you should ask a [community software] vendor is: How easy is it to leave you? It’s not a fun question to ask, but the answer is crucial to me. It’s a deal-breaker question.” -Patrick O’Keefe

Some community platforms try to lock their customer data into the platform (18:07): “When [a client is] onboarding [to new community software during the] initial year or two, they don’t care about their data export. It’s at the end. That’s a long-term reputational issue about how people talk about their experiences. We saw that with [community software] competitors. We had some trouble with a couple of competitors in trying to get the data from them and spent way more hours than particular customers were worth – just on principle, honestly – getting the data out for them because we were so personally offended. At least I was.” -Lincoln Russell

When you aren’t selling community software to the people who will actually use it (20:37): “In the [community software] sales process, you identify stakeholders – people that are decision makers. A lot of the time they weren’t a community manager. A lot of the time it was a director of technology, it was a CEO, or other positions, and that warps your roadmap.

“When those are the people that [the] sales team [is] sitting in front of, day in and day out, and you’re pitching an improved moderation queue, they want this button that does this thing. You’re like, ‘But that’s stupid.’ But it doesn’t matter. If those are the people you’re selling to, [with] their own idea of community that doesn’t actually align with community management because they have internal business goals, and all they want to do are check those boxes.” -Lincoln Russell

Why community professionals should drive community platform choice (22:10): “Although I’d like to believe, ego-wise, that I could make a community out of whatever piece of garbage application you throw in front of me, I know the software can either help me or hurt me, and it’s tough when you’re making dinner with someone else’s ingredients.” -Patrick O’Keefe

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