For Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, being open to doing business has its own meaning.
Van Leeuwen is CEO of SUSE, a provider of enterprise and cloud software solutions. SUSE, whose customers include 60% of the Fortune 500, is open source. The business model gives van Leeuwen and his team a greater purpose than just selling software, while also building trust with customers.
SUSE creates products by collaborating on projects with the open source community of programmers. The resulting software is available for anyone to use, change, and share.
So instead of selling software licenses, SUSE makes money by selling subscriptions to enterprise-grade versions of, say, the Linux operating system, plus support, updates, security patches and other services. Customers also have the option of using multiple hardware and cloud vendors.
For customers, van Leeuwen compares it to switching mobile providers, while keeping your number and all the data on your phone. “We help them in all of these environments to have a single pane of glass, effectively, as a single way of managing things, without having to commit 100% to a single vendor,” he tells me from London.
“And we all saw last Friday how risky it is to be dependent on a single supplier,” van Leeuwen adds.
Seriously. He’s referring to the CrowdStrike disaster, in which a faulty software update from the cybersecurity giant crashed millions of Windows computers worldwide.
Van Leeuwen strongly believes in open source as a driver for innovation.
“There are smarter ways to profit from the use of software than copyrighting or licensing it the old-fashioned way,” he says. “All the latest and greatest trends on the Internet, all the way up to AI, have their roots in open source, in learning from each other’s technology rather than hiding it and not showing how you did it.”
SUSE builds trust with customers because it focuses on their success by ensuring they have a working, stable solution in the rapidly changing world of open source, van Leeuwen explains. If there is a problem, the company can address it quickly.
And it may sound counterintuitive, but van Leeuwen cites the security benefits of open source. “If you want something to be safe and secure, the more people look at it, the more people challenge it, the better the quality is going to be,” he says. “That’s the open source model. It’s not like you’re operating in isolation and a few people can make a decision.”
Van Leeuwen, who joined SUSE last year after nearly two decades at rival Red Hat, sees an organizational model there too. Open source is a meritocracy, because the best solution wins, he says. Van Leeuwen wants the same at SUSE, whose core values are trust, freedom, accountability and transparency. “When you use meritocracy in an organization, you flatten the hierarchy and create a world where people with great ideas are listened to.”
All 2,500 employees worldwide are free to speak out, van Leeuwen notes. “It gives people a purpose, because you have something to work for and feel good about,” he says. “You participate in a fair environment where your contribution counts for what it is and not for who you are or where you come from.”
Van Leeuwen and his leadership team build trust by being transparent. “When we have to make a decision about something, we put it on the table,” he says. “And believe me, people are very vocal, they give a lot of input. But that’s also because they feel safe.”
For leaders who want to follow suit, van Leeuwen suggests checking your ego and matching words to actions. “If you are true to what you say you will do, you will get a lot more credit and build a lot more trust.”
It’s a done deal.
Nick Rockel
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This story originally appeared on Fortune.com