Is open source losing its soul?
Early free-software advocates like Richard Stallman raged against the copyright-toting software capitalists, yearning for a brighter day of peace, love, and (GNU) Linux. In 1998, afraid that this quasi-hippie ideal might scare away the business world from embracing free software, Eric Raymond and a few others came up with the term "open source," broadening the tent well beyond free-software radicals.
Today that tent is broad enough to include everyone from Stallman (still fighting the same fight he always has) to Microsoft, with the poignancy of the term "open source" coming to lose some of its fire, even as the power and breadth of its code base increases dramatically.
Has open source come to include so much that it's somewhat meaningless? If so, should we return to the free-software roots that defined its infancy?
Personally, I think the bigger the tent, the better it is for open source. Even a tent that includes a wide array of open-source leeches, an issue taken up by Bill Snyder in InfoWorld.
I like the big tent (and even, increasingly, the "leeches") because the broadening is largely driven by the same motivation: finding ways to feed one's family by writing more open-source software.
That, after all, is really the reason for the term "open source" in the first place: make it more relevant so more people could create sustainable businesses around it. Indeed, as Jack and Suzy Welch recently opined in Businessweek, the hallmark of a great company is how much value it drives to its employees and shareholders:
A company's foremost responsibility is to do well. That may sound politically incorrect, but the reason is inexorable. Winning companies create jobs, pay taxes, and strengthen the economy. Winning companies, in other words, enable social responsibility, not the other way around. And so, right now--as always--companies should be putting profitability first. It's the necessity that makes every other necessity possible.
Red Hat is nice when it writes open-source software. Red Hat is great when it employs thousands of people to do that, people who can care for themselves, their families, and their communities.
Doing good by doing well. This is the principle that drives the open-source start-ups that I know, from MindTouch to Cloudera to Compiere, but it also drives the "proprietary" companies like IBM and Oracle that contribute a great deal of code to open source while also ensuring they pursue business strategies that enable them to be financially competitive.
It's fine for free-software purists to insist that the world abandon all proprietary designs, but until they demonstrate that more money can be made in this way and, hence, more total social good can be achieved, then their arguments rightly ring hollow.
I've been in that camp. I urged the world to "burn the boats." I hold by that counsel, as it was a direction to look forward to new licensing and business models, rather than fixate on the past, largely as Google has now done with its Wave product.
But if you torch your "boat" into the ground without any idea as to how to get your business to $100 million in sales, you're rightly going to get singed (or worse) with your business. Open-source developers have a responsibility to do well so that more open-source software can afford to be written. At present, this may require keeping some bits proprietary. Hopefully in the future it won't.
Until that blissful day, it is foolish to hold to a purist software development philosophy if it minimizes your ability to feed your family and to be widely relevant to the industry.
Follow me on Twitter @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. 
So your point is, as stated, valid; holding on to Free software principles over practicality is bad for open source. But your premise is flawed, making the point irrelevant. It could also be said that holding on to open source values over principle is bad for Free software (which RMS does, indeed, say a lot). So in the end, each person has to decide for him/herself what is more important: open source or Free software. For me it's the latter, but I respect that some people put the former first. As long as you recognise and respect that they're two different things.
OPEN SOURCE - is stuff for which I can download the source code which I can modify as I see fit. I can also contribute my efforts back into the "pool" so that others might benefit, that might be in the form of enhancements, defect corrections, documentation etc. It's what sites like Sourceforge, Google Code and Codeplex are about.
FREE SOURCE - is source code I can download and make use of as I see fit, but there's no formal mechanism for me to share my changes, enhancements etc with a community of other developers and users. Much of what's available from sites such as CodeProject, C#Corner etc fall into this category.
I don't see a problem with any of these practices
I feel compelled to respond to Matt's "...Red Hat is great when it employs thousands of people ...".
In software development big is not beautiful, I assume Matt's not familiar with the name Fred Brooks. The purpose of any organisation to deliver value to its stakeholders Maximising the number of employees is unlikely to do that, perhaps Matt's also not heard of Lenin & Mao; they both tried that strategy, the results of which were catastrophic - tens (perhaps hundreds) of millions dying of starvation.
To your premise that we shouldn't burn the boats, free software does not require business models, or companies, or an economy. Other industries required business models because the costs of creating and distributing the product were so high. But today, it is possible for a single programmer in his free time and with donated bandwidth to make a superior product to fill a niche software need. Multiply by hundreds and thousands and your free software project can compete with the largest effort a company or economy can muster.
Open source may or may not be losing its soul but to free software it doesn't really matter. It's a hollow sideshow of a term specifically designed to ignore a tough issue. Isn't this precisely the time to take on the tough issues?
They start out acquiring open source programmers and then go all commercial without rewarding those involved in the development process.
That is a shame.
So, the GPL license is perfect for general software, for well supported software, like OS, Browser, Office tools, and so on. But I think we need also other types of free licenses that are able to solve several issues of the GPL. Let's make some example.
A developer believe in a new project. He worked 3 years over it making a nice GPL software, with much work and much sacrifices. Most probably he didn't got much support because new, unknown, a niche and simply because most projects don't get a support. Still his software is very nice. One day day a publisher company see that software, makes a CDROM out of it, print 10000 copies and sell it well in most computer shops and supermarkets of the country. The publisher has the money and know HOWTO but it's a greedy publisher and he doesn't give back a cent to the developer. GPL allow it but is this correct?
Right now a guy is selling several GPL software on E-Bay. He specify all the nice features but not the name of the software, selling it for like $10. After you bought it you discover that you got a well known software already on your computer. Is this correct?
I found on the net a nice GPL software that was copied, renamed, changed a little bit to give a different look and sold as a proprietary software. It's a violation, but it is happening. The original author is just a sole developer without funds and power to stop that, even then sometimes it's not easy because such a bad guy stays in another country. Is this correct?
A single developer is creating a free nice software, every month 20,000 users download it but he get an average of only $50 in donations, because it's a niche software for a small market. And mostly because our world still don't believe much in donations. His wish is to make the software better but he can spend only some spare free time over it because he must work to maintain his own life. He feels unhappy for not having more time to improve it in a more extensive way. If only a 1% of the users would donate him $10 this would be enough for a full time development and a much better software. But even less would be enough for to support well the development of new features. Is this the correct way to go on with free software?
I'm not criticizing the GPL license, I'm saying that we need also other "free to use" licenses that can solve those issues, that are suitable for small free projects. I want a license where at least 99% of the users can use the software freely but 1% support it with what they can. A license where everyone making money out of it support the software too (proportionally). A license where someone could possible not steal easily the software and sell it. All this should happen naturally in an ideal world, without the need of a license at all, just public domain should be enough. But today this is not happening, so we need a license that help small developers/publishers all around the world.
Two last notes, first that when we buy a bread we are not paying only the flour+water+oven heat but we are paying also for who prepared the bread, even and especially for his capacity to make a good bread from the same things. For the same reason we should support who develop softwre. And at last I fully agree that software or generally speaking knowledge should be give to the whole community, should be owned by the whole community.
Andrea
You bring up a good point. Free software doesn't have to be distributed without a fee. I would recommend that your hypothetical single developer start charging $5 or $10 to download it. It's true other sources would pop up to allow a user to download it but charging for the download enables people to support the developer at the same time they download the software.
To address your point, why not start educating free software developers on why they should charge for distribution, offer support subscriptions and allow users to set bounties?
Check out http://lmframework.com/page.php?id=pbos
Then send me an email, the contact information is on the site.
Thanks
David
Yes, someone can press CDs and sell them. One of the points of the GPL is to reinforce alternative vendors for the same vendor. This reduces vendor lock-in.
If someone buys software for 1 cent when it doesn't specify the name, they're an idiot.
The Software Freedom Law Centre will deal with any violations pro bono. They have prosecuted several times in behalf of the Busybox developers (most companies are smart enough to apologise and comply with the license before this stage).
If a single developer isn't getting much in donations it's probably not that good. Blender got $100,000 dollars in donations just to buy the rights off the investors to go open source.
Finally. The GPL doesn't care about the developer. It's for the rights of the user to demand better features if they're to pay, change vendors for the same software if they're getting stiffed and have no shonky EULA that restricts their rights to criticise the product (see MS EULAs re. benchmark results).
There are other ways to make money with these and I don't just mean manuals and books. How many people would pay, say, $2 a month for the right to vote on which new feature should be worked on, most important bugfix, prior access to new packaged releases (before anyone else)?
There are numerous ways to make it worth it for people to donate just a little money and in a world and you're right, it only take a small proportion to do so for it to be a good amount.
I swear, English _is_ my first language.
I've noticed a bit of a shift in your views over the last few months, and I have to say I'm glad for it. You have a loud and powerful voice and because of that have the opportunity to influence many people, good or bad. I sill believe that proprietary plays a bigger role than you do, and I stand by my positions that some open source projects such as GNU/Linux do more harm than good to the software industry as a whole. The reality is that GNU/Linux fosters too much software that erodes the value of other entities' intellectual property, but that's not to say that all open source projects are bad. For example, I think Apache is an excellent open source project since all web servers sprang from the open source well of httpd. Where I have my major problem with open source is when developers and companies decide it's ok for them to selectively use IP to their benefit. It's quite hypocritical for a company to enforce their open source license of choice through copyright law while skirting patent law with said project.
I expect proprietary companies to justify the cost by being significantly better than what's available or providing something which can't be found elsewhere. If you can't do that, then maybe you should do something you're good at. The days of pushing out substandard products and still expecting people to pay upfront are numbered.
I agree completely on software (regardless of its source) competing with better ideas. My big problem is that many, many open source projects cannibalize markets by misappropriating others' ideas without paying for them as is required by patent law. A really good example is the Dish Network DVR is impinging on the patents of Tivo and they have been appropriately spanked to over $104M. Now, this is all about software, not hardware. Tivo is a contributor to FOSS, but they also maintain their own proprietary software for the sole purpose of being able to protect their intellectual property. If the Dish Network DVR were based on FOSS software it would not have mattered and they still would have gotten sued for distributing software that impinges on Tivo's patent.
What the hell has this got to do with F/OSS v Closed? Microsoft have been sued over many patents. Proprietary companies get sued over software patents all the time.
I'm ******* sick of the constant onslaught of ******** about F/OSS and patents as if this was a widespread deliberate policy to ignore any potential patents.
What, when MS gets sued over patents it's because they didn't know about the patent but when F/OSS software does it, it's somehow a deliberate act? Damn, that bias has an aweful stench.
Update: Dish Network wins stay of contempt order in TiVo case
http://www.bizjournals.com/portland/stories/2009/06/01/daily49.html
Ohfertheloveof... TiVo won in Texas. Well, who doesn't? Let's see how the appeal pans out, eh?
Gimme a ******* break.
It means you don't have to re-solve problems that have already been solved - leaving you to focus on adding-value by working on problems which haven't been solved yet.
It's the same process that has driven the accumulation of knowledge throughout history.
It's just a pity it's so hard to make a dime from it.
The cost and time savings are immense while allowing new companies to emerge that otherwise would not (thus producing jobs, extra tax revenue, etc.). Hence doing social better (not just good).
- by pentest June 4, 2009 1:18 PM PDT
- Yes companies such as Alfresco and Microsoft have misused the term.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(18 Comments)The real problem is that businessmen have turned the term into a meaningless marketing word.