It's OK to be an open-source flip-flopper
Reading through the latest copy of BusinessWeek last night, I particularly enjoyed this comment from Jack and Suzy Welch on political "flip-flopping," otherwise known as "changing one's mind in the face of new information":
It's hard to know exactly when flip-flopping first became a dirty word in the leadership lexicon. But in recent years, it has been the epithet of choice against political candidates on both sides of the fence...In those cases, critics made it sound as if revising a stance is some kind of a moral failing.
What nonsense. It is the essence of leadership to have the self-confidence to admit that a strategy has gone off course or a position has become outdated. And it is the responsibility of all leaders in such a "predicament" to revise their direction swiftly, widely communicate it, and move on without undue pandering or emotionality.
We have the same pride in open source--the same fear to change our business models to reflect customer and market realities--and it can be debilitating. Just ask MySQL, which was repeatedly stymied in its efforts to tweak its model to enable a revenue stream more consistent with its massive popularity.
Not that MySQL is alone. Luke Kanies, founder of the successful Puppet project, describes his own reasons for running this purity gauntlet in an excellent post describing his company's "Open Core" business model. Kanies waxes pragmatic, not philosophical, and that's why I think Puppet, as well as the company (Reductive Labs) behind it, will succeed.
For years, open source divided itself into purists (of which I was part) and the hybrids (or "mutts," as one friend called it while I was at Novell, a hybrid open-source company). What nonsense, to use the Welches' phrasing.
We make open source entirely too ideological, too political. As I discovered at the New York CTO Club, the open-source vendor community, enterprise IT buyers care far more about whether software works (and is sold at a compelling price) than they do about its ideological wrappings. On that day, I became a flip-flopper. I've been much happier ever since and, I feel, much more community and customer-focused.
It's time for the open-source community to become far more pragmatic and, when necessary, to flip-flop. This isn't to suggest that we should forget our ideals, such as transparency and reduced vendor lock-in. But it is to declare that we need to spend less time fetishizing open-source politics and more time focusing on customer pragmatism. We should be a lot less like Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation, in other words, and much more like Eric Raymond of the Open Source Initiative.
And lest we flip-flop alone, here's a suggestion for Microsoft: be more like Ray Ozzie and less like Steve Ballmer. Flip-flop on open source. You'll like it.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
If Stallman hadn't created the GPL, and pushed forward the free software movement the pragmatists probably never would have gotten ahold of it to create Free Software. You need the hard core people to really come up with something because they aren't always worrying about the pros and cons and how to make it perfect. Then what they create others refine. It's just the way of the world. Stallman is a creator, and Ray Ozzie is a refiner. While we may be moving into a stage of maturity with open source that requires more pragmatism without the purists we might never have gotten the AGPL, something I think is violently necessary to keep companies like Google from becoming companies like Microsoft in the long term.
Stallman may have gotten the GPL off the ground, but he's largely become irrelevant now and he knows it. The FSF's antics do more damage to FOSS's reputation than help it and their outright hostility to proprietary platforms and vendors creates unnecessary obstacles to open source adoption.
The ones who complain the loudest, in my experience, are consultants. These guys have the mentality of "it's okay for me to make money from your product, just not you." Just ask those companies to significantly discount their services, let alone give them away for free.
If you product is good and you can develop a following, good for you. I think open source is the target of many right now purely because the commercial products finally have a reason to be nervous for the first time in years. The open source community is turning out mature, viable products, and the companies will really have a good reason to come to drink at the OSS fountains due to the climate.
Watch out commercial offerings... a new day is coming... soon... All you companies who are paying hundreds of thousands in maintenance for solutions you paid 7 or 8 figures on, you have reason to start looking. This is a new day focused on value and the big dogs are getting scared.
I fully agree with flip-flopping, I never understood US politics for this aspect of it. (Some other aspects of it too, I guess :-) Personally, I consider it a point of pride to admit asap that I may have been wrong on some point and change my mind as much as is necessary.
It was interesting to read you saying explicitly that you *were* a part of the purists camp, I've been trying to understand your blog posts over the last 2 years and interpreted them exactly like that, but wasn't sure if I was reading you correctly. Further, it seems the 1 billion USD paid for MySQL coincides with your change of opinion here :-)
Anyway, while I fully accept your right to be a flip-flopper, I don't agree with everything that you and similarly "business" minded people read into Open Source. This sentence strikes a nerve: "to enable a revenue stream more consistent with its massive popularity".
How do you - or anyone - know what is the appropriate amount of revenue consistent with massive popularity? Perhaps the whole point of Open Source is that you can have millions of users that don't pay anyone a dime for using it. It is of course an interesting business excercise to figure out how you can make money on your popularity, but as a premise we shouldn't assume that there is any such revenue. I always make this point inside MySQL: While our big userbase is of course a big pool of potential customers, this is not the primary signifigance of a user community or an Open Source community. And even if Sun is the "owner" of MySQL, in Open Source, it is not an "us" vs "them" situation.
So I fully accept the right of Open Source purists to reject the Open Core model. It is not Open Source and there is no reason to pretend otherwise. For instance in the case of MySQL, we already can see it is just a matter of time before 3rd parties start developing Open Source alternatives to our closed source "differentiated features". When that happens, then what do we do with our business model?
But I also admit the world is not black and white. Our Enterprise features are also what customers pay for. One time a customer started a sales visit quite frankly: We are happy to pay for MySQL, but for us to do that, we want to see some shiny enterprisey features that we get for that money.
It's not what I - a purist to some degree - would have said, but it is what that customer said and many other say more indirectly. And we give those customers what they want.
- by pentest March 4, 2009 9:31 AM PST
- There is some truth to what you say, but if you alienate your community you risk losing a lot and end up competition against yourself.
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(6 Comments)Just ask Tenable.