For those in the commercial open-source world (and that's most everyone now), we need to focus on finding ways to draw more people into the cash/code bargain without sacrificing the benefits that derive from fee-free adoption of open source.
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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 general manager of the Americas division and 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.
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You posit that because communities don't grow on software that gets "open-sourced", software doesn't grow on communities. You couldn't be more mistaken. Nearly every open-source project started as a few people and grew a community, and grew more software as a direct result of that community. Or, as you call them, "free-loaders."
Now, you are correct that communities don't magically form when a closed-source company says, "Ahh, look! We are such benevolent and wonderful people that we are opening our software upon you plebes. Flock to us!" That does not mean that software can't be born the other way around. There are many many examples that prove the point.
Heck, open-source software was not even on any business radar until the "free-riders" made it what it is today.
The "free-riders" are the ones who turned an open-source project with one guy scratching an itch into a project with multiple contributors because they said "hey, this is cool, I wonder if I can help out?"
The "free-riders" are the ones who ran the bleeding edge version first and found (and sometimes fixed themselves!) bugs so your Enterprise customers could take advantage of the rock-solid reliability of open-source software when those bugs got fixed.
The "free-riders" are the ones who helped other "free-riders" on the project's discussion list when they were trying to install the software, so the user-base grew, even though they couldn't contribute code.
The "free-riders" are not just some abstract pool of people from which you extract cash. In a true open-source project, they are the foundation that makes the project something great. Everyone who is a contributing part of an open-source project was once a "free-rider" who just wanted to try it out. Every person involved in any way at all adds momentum, even if it's just by asking a question and being answered on the list. That answer goes into the global pool of knowledge (which maybe a future user will find, while googling, and won't have to ask himself).
Of course, if you're an Enterprise-with-a-capital-E company that "value-adds" on top of open-source code, you see them as "free-riders" because you don't really have a community in the first place, you just have users. The users of the open-source part of your software are only there at the whim of the proprietary side of the business. There's too much risk the community will do something at odds with the direction you want to take the proprietary parts of the system for them to be able to form a true community in the sense "real" open-source projects can.
In the end, the "free-riders" are only a negative if you aren't truly an open-source company. They are an adversary that could cut away at the functionality you charge for, rather than users who are empowered and have the right to contribute and make stronger something larger than themselves.
No hard feeling Mr. Mark. Someone just seems to have gone one-up on you. its all in the game... :-)
I agree that many companies think that changing to an open source development model will save their ailing business but you seem to be confusing free software projects which start with a handful of people and then grow in size to proprietary companies who think of it as a magic potion.
I know 'open source capitalists' see everything with a ledger and that's fine but it ends up being a narrow view of why and how developers participate to free software projects.
You've attracted some interesting comments here.
I think commercial open source has to reach beyond the technically smart and work with the business user. And to me that means lots more education.
I also think 'open source' is/should be a short-hand about the kind of customer service one can expect. So, I think there is a branding task to be done that rises above the literal / technical.
Commercial open source needs to think about some sort of 'governance' model that ensures companies running this model uphold the brand value. Commercial open source can and should be branding itself as a higher-value product than proprietary.
Jason
- by llamastorm June 4, 2008 4:09 PM PDT
- Matt, I think you're missing the point here. We call these awesome folks USERS. Free software is about a community of ideas and software and people who use them. Whether it's just as simple as recommending software to a friend or filing a bug report, just being there makes the entire movement stronger and leads to even more network effects. Let each person contribute as they desire to contribute, and everything just flows. Some one that is a simple user today may later submit a patch, test a feature, or just say "you know, wouldn't it be cool if this did X?". And when you do X, that X may become a breakthrough to untold benefits.
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