Enterprises and other users deploy open-source software because it works. For those of us in the open-source vendor community, however, too often we waste time talking about issues that have relatively little resonance for the vast majority of users.
We miss the mark on open-source marketing. In fact, it's often the case that the very standards we seek to set for the software world--interoperability, transparency, etc.--are better observed and delivered by open standards than by open source.
As a case in point, Red Hat and other open-source companies (including Alfresco, my employer) routinely advertise "no lock-in" as a key reason to buy open source. There are two problems with this marketing pitch: one, it's only technically true, and two, customers don't care, as Redmonk's Stephen O'Grady recently noted.
On the first, it's true that open source can reduce vendor lock-in by ensuring that a customer can get support and ongoing code development from someone other than the original developer of the software. But this is only trivially true.
Once a customer invests in a particular vendor (be it Red Hat or Canonical or Novell or MySQL or...), there will always be a cost associated with leaving that vendor, a cost that arguably isn't much different whether that vendor's code is open source or proprietary.
Cost aside (which is easier said than done, as cost is the primary consideration for the buyer), the support options for Vendor X's code from Vendor Y or Z are unlikely to be on par with what Vendor X can deliver. Just ask Red Hat about CentOS or Oracle Enterprise Linux support. ("Compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux can only be verified by Red Hat's internal test suite.")
Apparently there's no lock-in...so long as you stay with the original open-source developer. :-)
The reality is that open-source vendors should be pitching real value to real customers. As Josef Assad presented at the Open Source Days 2008 conference, open source should strive to "lose the TCO (total cost of ownership) war with proprietary vendors." Open-source value is about performance and flexibility at a great price--and not necessarily about absolute freedom from lock-in.
Red Hat gets this. That's why most of the time it sells the value of its subscriptions, and not the hocus-pocus "no lock-in" story. Red Hat doesn't have 75 percent of the paid Linux market (or, probably more accurately, 62 percent, according to IDC) because of its lock-in story.
Would-be customers don't care about that. Really. They just want Red Hat's performance and price, especially compared with Unix.
In fact, to the extent that customers really do want interoperability and reduced vendor lock-in, it's open standards that they should be asking for, not open source.
IBM's Savio Rodrigues points this out in his analysis of the different permutations on the open-source WebKit project. Serdar Yegulalp adds to the analysis:
Source code is a building block, not a standard. It's something you turn into other things. A standard is something that stands above and apart from all of those things, a guideline for what that finished product ought to be like....
The problem with using code as a standard is simple: it's too fluid. The minute you implement it in something, it's not the same code anymore. It almost always has to be changed to fit its container, as water changes to fit.
Open source is an indispensable complement to open standards, but it's not a substitute for them.
This isn't the only area where open-source vendors misread customer tea leaves. For years open-source insiders have debated definitions for "open-source vendor," even as customers shrugged their shoulders and continued using open source--from different vendors with very different business strategies--without worrying about the various shades of ideology and pragmatism that fuel open-source development. I'm as guilty of leading this foolish march as anyone.
Real customers simply don't care.
This is why I think Sun open-source guru Simon Phipps' proposed expansion of the Open Source Initiative's charter is misguided, though very well-intentioned. (The 451 Group's Matt Aslett also weighs in on the proposal.)
Phipps wants the OSI to establish a "holistic vision of software freedom against which businesses can be benchmarked" because too many companies, apparently, are calling themselves "open source" without a consistent definition for what this means.
I don't think it matters. The reality is that businesses don't seem to have any trouble adopting open source regardless of such "truth-in-labeling" initiatives. Gartner suggests that 85 percent of businesses are already using open source. Forrester tells us that a big majority of enterprises are adopting open source because it's delivering real cost and quality benefits to them.
And so the problem is...?
Well, the problem is that open-source advocates are often out-of-sync with open-source adopters. We probably need a new breed of open-source advocate, as ZDNet's Jason Perlow suggests, the kind that reflect customer interests in pragmatic adoption and not advocates' interest in controlling and fine-tuning that adoption.
We don't need paternalistic oversight of open-source adoption, and we don't need to fuel it through vague and inaccurate marketing. Open source is a fantastic way to develop and distribute software. Customers recognize this and don't need to be cajoled or confused into buying.
One of the profound failings of the open-source movement is how insular it has allowed its ideology to be. While the commercialization of open source has necessarily forced a new dialectic into open source (one with many different shades and permutations), it's amazing just how unyielding some opinions can be. While constancy is good, it can also be the "hobgoblin of mediocre minds" and reflects a somewhat stagnant discussion within the open-source development community.
It also reflects the theme of noted legal scholar Cass Sunstein's new book, Going to Extremes: How Like Minds United and Divide, part of which is excerpted in The Spectator ("To become an extremist, hang around with people you agree with").
The message is unnerving and suggests the importance of broadening the open-source tent:
When people find themselves in groups of like-minded types, they are especially likely to move to extremes....The most important reason for group polarisation, which is key to extremism in all its forms, involves the exchange of new information. Group polarisation often occurs because people are telling one another what they know, and what they know is skewed in a predictable direction. When they listen to each other, they move.
Suppose you are in a group of people whose members tend to think that Israel is the real aggressor in the Middle East conflict, that eating beef is unhealthy, or that same-sex unions are a good idea. In such a group, you will hear many arguments to that effect. Because of the initial distribution of views, you will hear relatively fewer opposing views. It is highly likely that you will have heard some, but not all, of the arguments that emerge from the discussion.
After you have heard all of what is said, you will probably shift further in the direction of thinking that Israel is the real aggressor, opposing eating beef, and favoring civil unions. And even if you do not shift--even if you are impervious to what others think--most group members will probably be affected.
Lest we think Sunstein is just picking on Harvard Law School graduates (I joke!), it's amazing to watch this same destructive group-think plague the open-source community, a portion of which is on display in the comments to any of my posts that discuss such horrifying ideas as "Open Core" (gasp!), Microsoft as a bona fide open-source player (yikes!), or, really, anything that fails to discuss knighthood and/or sainthood for Richard Stallman.
We've come a long way since the early days of the free-software movement. Eric Raymond, Tim O'Reilly, Michael Tiemann, Larry Augustin, and others broke that free-software mold with the coining of "open source" back in 1998, but far too many opinions seem stuck in a calcified past, largely because they spend a lot of time yelling down opposing views, rather than associating with them and listening to them.
This might include, for example, more business-minded open-source people. But it would also be helpful to include those in the open-source community that are deeply affected by open source, but may have very different views on what open source should mean, including representatives from Microsoft and Oracle, or simply developers who disagree with the current board's opinions.
I'm sure the current OSI board disagrees. It's not alone. OSI board aspirant Bruce Perens partly based his candidacy to be on the board on the premise that the OSI needs fewer vendors represented and definitely not Microsoft. I doubt Perens will agree with much of what I write here.
Even so, the OSI--and open source more broadly--would do well to incorporate the various, opposing biases that make for real debate...and better results. OSI President Michael Tiemann calls out others' bias without seeming to recognize just how helpful it would be to have that bias represented at the table.
Less group think, in other words, and more group debate. This is what open source needs. It would be wonderful to have it start at the top with the OSI.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
The open-source community has a long tradition of looking for and hounding away at the very thought of Microsoft influence from government IT policies.
For example, Open Source Initiative President Michael Tiemann rightly decries an alleged tie between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's charitable donations and Microsoft's "cabinet-level access to inform policy."
Apparently, however, Tiemann has no problem proudly displaying a picture of Brazil's president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, wearing a Red Hat fedora, declaring...
Would that all Presidents and all ministers of all countries were so concerned about the sovereignty of their nation and the fiduciary care of their people!
...that they'd openly stand behind one vendor? That doesn't sound much like a sovereign act to me.
In fact, it sounds exactly like the sort of bias that the open-source community routinely inveighs against. Imagine the outcry if President Lula would have been seen posing with Bill Gates, wearing a Microsoft t-shirt?
Mark Taylor, president of the U.K.'s Open Source Consortium, lashed out against the U.K. government "pay(ing) lip service" to open source while "actually pursuing policies that are exclusive." Presumably it would be better if those "exclusive" policies actually favored a particular open-source vendor or technology?
That seems to be the message coming out of Europe, too, in its proposed policy changes around the purchase of standards-based technologies, which some suggest amounts to a built-in bias for open source. Policies that promote openness, generally, are good, because they help to protect a country's sovereign interests.
But when a country's leaders are seen to be supporting a particular vendor, even a vendor of open source and open standards, that strikes me as just the sort of favoritism that we disparage when the beneficiary is Microsoft. Just because it's bias in our favor doesn't make it right.
Back to Brazil. Sun Microsystems' Simon Phipps also posted pictures of President Lula wearing the Red Hat fedora, but also a Sun Java ring. (The president apparently said it made him feel like "James Bond.") At least Java is a technology, not a vendor, which makes this act of Lula less...loony.
Simon Phipps and Lula show their open-source colors
(Credit: Simon Phipps)That said, the ironic thing is that while Phipps points to the benefits Brazil derives from its commitment to open-source Java, he neglects to note that Brazil had this same commitment to Java long before it was actually open source.
Regardless, in describing Lula's affection for open source Phipps unwittingly makes him sound like an open-source groupie, which is hardly how I'd want my president to act, either for proprietary or open-source interests.
A sovereign nation should be just that: sovereign. Its leaders shouldn't bow to particular vendors or even particular development practices, nor should they be perceived to do such. For Brazil, it's immaterial whether the company is Sun, Red Hat, Microsoft, or SAP: it is a sovereign nation and should act as such.
A government tasked with the protection of its people should never look like a cheap infomercial for any vendor--either open source or proprietary.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
The open-source industry sometimes seems like it comes straight out of a Dickens novel. Like the debate surrounding the United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company in "Nicholas Nickleby," I'm constantly amazed by the industry's ability to spend time determining how much open source can dance on the head of a pin. (Answer: none, because no one can ever be pure enough to pass muster with the guardians of purity.)
It's clear: while open source presents a hardy threat to open source, it pales in comparison to the threat presented by mindless and endless wrangling over just what "open" means in open source.
Other areas of the technology world also discuss openness, but not with nearly the level of dogmatism that open sourcerors do. One mobile blog, for example, presents a taxonomy of openness, but makes no rigid judgments about what is right and wrong.
Ultimately, there are two things that matter in open source: producers and consumers. So long as producers can feed their families, and consumers are not locked into any particular software, it's unclear to me why we continue to strain at open-source purity gnats (swallowing irrelevancy camels in the process).
"Open source" was created to balance against free-source dogma. It was founded as a bastion of rational thought around freedom in software; as an alternative to the more didactic Free Software Foundation. Eric Raymond and the other founders deserve our sincere thanks for making open-source software distinct and desirable to businesses everywhere.
"Open source" should remain the province of pragmatism, the guiding principle that motivated its creation. There are various interpretations of openness, and various stages at which companies and individuals are willing to open source all of their code. We should promote the evolution of the industry toward openness, not point to flaws in individuals as they make that journey.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Someone needs to tell the Open Source Initiative, Google, and others who fret about license proliferation that the market has already cut down the number of actively used licenses to just a small handful: L/GPL, BSD/Apache, MPL, and a few others (EPL, CPL). Even so, the OSI has decided to kickstart its stalled movement to reduce the number of open-source licenses condoned by the OSI.
As OSI board member Russ Nelson writes in the board minutes:
Mr. Nelson moves that we form a license proliferation committee to evaluate all existing licenses into two tiers - an upper tier and a lower tier of licenses (e.g. "recommended" and "compliant"). The role of this committee would be to establish criteria for assigning the tier for each license, use a new license-proliferation mailing list for discussion and come up with a final list of two tiers of licenses....The deadline for presenting the draft recommendations from the committee back to the board will be October 2008.
It's a worthy cause, but one that has already been effectively fought and settled by the free market. I would hazard a guess that upwards of 95 percent of all open-source projects are licensed under less than 5 percent of open-source licenses. (The last time I checked, 88 percent of Sourceforge projects were L/GPL or BSD. It's been a non-issue for many years.)
There is no open-source proliferation problem. Do we have a lot of open-source licenses? Yes, just as we have a lot of proprietary licenses (in fact, we have many more of those). But we don't have a license proliferation problem, because very few open-source licenses actually get used on a regular basis.
This is a phantom. It seems scary, but it's not real.
Disclosure: I used to serve on OSI's board.
The Open Source Initiative just announced the results of its 2008 board elections. The good news? I'm out. (I wasn't able to give the amount of time needed by the OSI--the OSI is a lot of work.)
The better news? Some fantastic new faces are in, namely Martin Michlmayr (Linux International, Debian, HP) and Harshad Gune (GNUify Conference, Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research in Pune, India).
I'm really happy to welcome Martin and Harshad to the OSI board, and to see the others remain (Danese, Michael, Russ, Ken, Alolita, Nnenna, Rishab, and Bruno). It's an excellent group of people, one well qualified to uphold the ideals of open source.
Ashlee Vance over at The Register has a nice profile of Mark Radcliffe, partner at DLA Piper and one of the top legal minds in open source, if not the top legal mind. Mark is a friend and colleague at the Open Source Initiative, and deserves the attention.
Despite his influence over commercial open source, few know just how deeply involved he has been. The Register, however, captures his influence succinctly:
... Read MoreCanard: a deliberately misleading fabrication.
That's the word I thought of when I read this article on how open-source license proliferation threatens adoption of open source in the enterprise. I stopped thinking of license proliferation as a serious threat to open source back in 2004 when the Open Source Initiative last beat this drum. Since then it has been very clear that license proliferation is a minor threat at best.
The analyst Saugatuck disagrees:
... Read MoreI moderated a panel yesterday that included John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM, as well as Danese Cooper, Open Source Initiative (OSI) board member. I was a bit surprised to find John criticize the OSI's make-up and mechanics, as The Register notes, but I can't say that I disagree with those complaints. John's basic point - for the OSI to have stronger resonance within the community should reflect that community - seems like a sound one.
But how do we get there from here?
... Read MoreGlyn Moody has written a probing article in LinuxJournal asking a tough question: "Why is Microsoft seeking official blessing of its shared-source licenses?" It's not as if the company is hard-up for money, and getting Open Source Initiative approval for a few licenses is unlikely to further shareholder interests.
So, what gives?
In Glyn's view, the answer lies in what the move could help Microsoft do to open source: fracture it. While I'm not one for discrimination, I do believe that it's worth taking a closer look at Glyn's theory and keeping it in mind as the OSI reviews Microsoft's licenses.
... Read More
