Can open source monopolize a market?

Open source is used to playing underdog to incumbent proprietary vendors. What will happen when open source dominates, rather than commoditizes, markets?

I ask because several open-source projects are not far from owning dominant market share in their respective markets. Mozilla's Asa Dotzler reports that Firefox is "on track to easily reach 25 percent of global usage by the end of the year." That may not sound like much, but given that Microsoft has been losing five percentage points of browser market share each year while Firefox gains five percentage points, and it's not hard to imagine Firefox surpassing IE's market share by early 2013.

Firefox isn't alone. Indeed, the Apache Web Server already dominates the Web server market, even despite new entrants to the market, as Glyn Moody highlights.

Linux, for its part, is still only 13.8 percent of the paid server market, while Windows Server still claims 38.1 percent market share, according to IDC. It has a long way to go, but in some markets like cloud computing and the growing Web 2.0 market, it plays a more authoritative role.

So, what happens when these and other open-source projects dominate their respective markets? Will it change how we market open source? Will it mean more research and development dollars must be invested?

Traditionally, open source has done a fantastic job of commoditizing expensive, well-understood markets. While I believe open source can innovate, particularly with companies behind open-source projects, it's still an open question as to whether the financial returns from open-source sales can pay for the heavy R&D and marketing costs that are generally required to create new products and new markets.

Open source has been better at business-model innovation than product innovation, though there are some notable exceptions.

Forget innovation for a minute, however: what will we do when Microsoft, Oracle, etc. are the runners-up, not the market leaders? Microsoft is a convenient (if inaccurate) proxy for all things that are bad in the software world for open sourcerors, but imagine the shift in thinking required to compete when, for example, Firefox has 80 percent market share and IE owns less than 20 percent. Who will we blame for our problems when our straw men are gone?

Perhaps none of this matters, however, as we could see dominant community-led open-source projects fork themselves long before they reach critical, market-dominating mass. It's not hard to imagine splinter groups forming within big open-source projects to take them in different directions, even as Joomla did with Mambo, Ubuntu did with Debian, etc.

The antidote to this is the open-source foundation. Among the examples of strong open-source projects that haven't forked--Eclipse, Apache Web Server, Mozilla Firefox--foundations have been critical to keeping these together. Linux, for its part, has been forked many times, but its core is held together by the Linux Foundation.

I believe the key to attaining dominant market share, and to preventing forks, is the open-source foundation. Over time, I suspect we'll see more "open-source companies" separate themselves into foundations, to manage the code, and corporations, to manage the monetization. This may be the only way to both liberate and dominate at the same time.

[sci062999]

In my years in a non-profit foundation, the office never pay for Linux. We probably went through at least 30 Linux servers over the years.

[lkrupp]

I can't wait to see the federal government attempt to sue a dispersed group that offers its products free of charge for anti-trust. But I'm absolutely sure they'll figure out how to do it if they get enough political pressure from Microsoft, Apple, and other corporations.

[fazalmajid]

People forget that Apache itself was a fork of NCSA httpd (it started as a collection of patches, leading to "a patchy server - Apache server"/ When an open-source project reaches saturation level, it just becomes an invisible part of the infrastructure. By construction, an open-source monopolist is incapable of wielding market power in the conventional sense.

[odubtaig]

I think Matt's also missed the point that there is no single company distributing/supporting Apache. I can't think of a single major Linux distribution that doesn't come with it integrated and the support for this comes from the distro vendor (assuming that vendor is paid for support), the community or on the case of hosting companies it comes from their own staff.

There are, of course, examples in which versions of software are tightly controlled by a single body as us the case with FireFox but this is not the case with Apache which is freely modified and redistributed by many companies and organisations. In this case, should it take over the market the 'monopoly' problem would be the same as if Linux took over the market, there would be no single body benefiting. Last I checked, this is the raison detre of FOSS (which would be interesting given that apache isn't FOSS, just OSS).

[zyxxy]

OSI and others consider Apache to be FOSS compliant. Not sure why you make the FOSS vs OSS distinction for Apache here.

[odubtaig]

Last I checked the Apache license does not require redistribution of source code if object code is redistributed. That makes it Open Source, not Free Software.

[jrepenning]

Great point! Foundations seem to be an effective way of buffering between the community and the corporation. It may turn out, though, that "the open-source foundation model" is nearly as hard to find as the mythical "open-source business model."

For example, there's a lot of community and business work that falls to the foundation, and a lot more to maintaining the foundation itself. The critical mass of value (however you care to measure that) that makes it cost-effective to found a foundation is quite large, compared to the average size of a single open-source project. That's why we see "foundation conglomerates," like Apache and Eclipse: it seems so easy to "let Eclipse do it." But it raises a new sort of "anti-trust" question: when does a "foundaglomerate" become a trust, or a monopoly?

[Random_Walk]

"What will happen when open source dominates, rather than commoditizes, markets?"

...everybody wins?

Seriously - having a given market "dominated" by something that can be forked at whim or will, sold by anybody, passed around freely, and re-made to individual taste and order? What the frick is so bad about that?

I honestly see no downside to it:

If the product(s) fail in some fashion, another OSS product will arise to take its place.

If the product(s) start imposing limitations, then those limits are removed by the first enterprising developer to grab a copy of the latest SVN/CVS tree update.

If someone prefers a proprietary solution, that someone is still perfectly free to buy/write/order one, and it will have to hew to open standards, so it will be easier to write and far easier to integrate into existing infrastructures.

I know, I know, cue the sad and over-used fallacy of poor starving developers and etc... On the contrary, if you as a programmer have some competence and a good skillset, you will thrive quite nicely in such an environment. If you suck at it and hide your incompetence behind a proprietary IDE, or you lean on a given proprietary language like it were some sort of crutch, then maybe it's time for you to either man-up and get some skills, or to go find another calling in life.

Nobody owes you a living just because you got an MCSD from a certification mill, and have no idea what to do without having Visual Studio installed first.

[bananaphonerules]

Wow. Since when did good training, certification and tools become evil?
Yes the IDE is a crutch. I prefer to code using bare wires and assembler.

[odubtaig]

There' a difference between using an IDE because it saves a ton of time and using it because you don't know any other way.

[zyxxy]

Exactly. Just like there is a difference between coding in Python instead of Assembly because it saves you a bunch of time and using it because you don't know any other way. To each use, the proper tool.

[Random_Walk]

zxzzy, odubtaig:

Thanks much for amplifying what I was trying to say :)

@bananaphonerules:

Good training and good tools are not evil. Certifications are dubious to say the least, especially in programming. However, relying on an IDE or a given language to save your career is not smart - Visual Studio can save you a ton of time when writing code destined for Windows platforms, but it can also become a crutch, and it becomes a hiding place for the incompetent.

When you can take the same code and modify it to work in Xtools (OSX), Eclipse or SlickEdit (Linux), or simply bang it together in a command-line editor (e.g. emacs or vi) and compile it with gcc if you have to? Then you are more able to adapt to change, which is what every competent programmer should strive for.

Same with languages - any language.

[ArtInvent]

The concept of 'monopoly' just wrongly applied here. Monopoly is a long, long way from that of a simple majority of market share or even market dominance. And I can't think of any open source project which is even near anything of the kind. Apache, eh, maybe. Firefox? Love it and use it, but sorry, not hardly.

For that matter, it's pretty arguable in my mind whether the concept of 'monopoly' could ever be applied to any open source project. Actually, the only way it could, is if the code were open to view and contributions, but that code and all contributions were still owned or controlled by a single entity.

And this is why the Free software movement exists. To make sure code is both open and free to use and modify and redistribute. If you want to avoid monopoly, that's really the only way.