For this software CEO, championing open-source drives innovation

For Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, being open for business has its own shade of meaning.

Van Leeuwen is CEO of SUSE, a provider of software solutions for enterprise and cloud. SUSE, whose clients include 60% of the Fortune 500, is open-source. Its business model gives van Leeuwen and his team a bigger 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 rather than peddle 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 choice of using multiple hardware and cloud vendors.

For clients, van Leeuwen compares it to switching mobile providers while still keeping your number and all the data on your phone. “We help them across 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 one single vendor,” he tells me from London.

“And we’ve all seen last Friday, also, how risky it is to be dependent on one single vendor,” van Leeuwen adds.

No kidding. He means the CrowdStrike disaster, which saw a faulty software update by the cybersecurity giant crash millions of Windows computers worldwide.

Van Leeuwen is a big believer in open-source as a driver of innovation.

“There are smarter ways of capitalizing on the usage of software than copyrighting it or licensing it in the old-fashioned way,” he says. “All the latest and greatest trends in the internet, all the way through AI, find 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 fast-changing world of open-source, van Leeuwen explains. If there is an issue, the company can swiftly address it.

And it might sound counterintuitive, but van Leeuwen cites the security advantages of open-source. “If you want something to be secure and to be safe, the more people look at it, the more people challenge it, the better the quality will be,” he says. “That’s the open-source model. It’s not like you operate in isolation and a few people can make a decision.”

Van Leeuwen, who joined SUSE last year after almost 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 key values are trust, freedom, accountability, and transparency. “If you put meritocracy to work in an organization, you flatten the hierarchy and you create a world in which people with great ideas are being listened to.”

All 2,500 or so employees around the world are free to speak up, van Leeuwen notes. “This gives purpose to people, because you then have something to go to work for and to feel good about,” he says. “You’re participating 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. “If we need to make a decision around anything, we will put it on the table,” he says. “And trust 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 with actions. “When you are true to what you say you will do, you get a lot more credit, you build a lot more trust.”

It’s an open-and-shut case.

Nick Rockel
nick.rockel@consultant.fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com