Of the formative figures in open source, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Eric Raymond loom large. Arguably, however, few have had as much of a disruptive force as Tim O'Reilly, who has helped to create the open-source market and has spent the last six years reshaping it with his seminal "Open Source Paradigm Shift" and other articles.
In an engaging and informative recent TWiT podcast, O'Reilly revisits the theme. It doesn't break new ground (for O'Reilly), but does highlight, and render somewhat meaningless, the fissures currently running through the open-source community.
Host Randal Schwartz kicks off the podcast with a question about Twitter: Is Tim concerned that "Twitter is anything but open?"
I like to think I have a more nuanced view of open than a lot of people. Some purists will say that [I'm] a traitor....From the very beginning of my advocacy about open source, I've really just been interested in having interesting things happen in the world.
The reason I like open source and worked on this idea of renaming it from "free software" to "open source" was because I don't think it's a religious issue. It's really about how do we actually encourage and spark innovation. Because for me a more interesting world is one where there's more innovation and more freedom to innovate....
The idea is that people can build on it. You give it away because you want other people to do things with it that you can't do or don't want to do.
Open source, in other words, is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end, and that end is collaborative innovation.
While reputation is the first goal of many open-source developers, it's really a means, with the end for many being money ("There's huge currency in reputation. And that's how most open-source developers have 'monetized' giving away things for free.") But it's not really the ultimate end for, as O'Reilly rightly points out, "Money is a signifier of a more fundamental exchange."
Today, O'Reilly suggests, the real value in open source has little to do with source code; instead, it's the result of that code. Value has moved to data, with "network-effect driven databases - user-generated databases - [serving as] the heart of Web 2.0."
And yet, as O'Reilly points out, the open-source world continues to fixate on the wrong battles:
The whole context of free and open-source software is not about Linux taking over the world and replacing Windows. That might even happen, just as the PC replaced the mainframe. And it probably will happen. But it doesn't change the dynamic....
The heart of how we need to understand free and open-source software is in the context of Web 2.0. We can have as much open-source software as we want but we've now created this new layer where these databases that grow through user contributions are the real source of lock-in.
Eventually, these guys probably will make their software open source because it won't matter. The value lies in having the data. The real question is, will there be a future open-source movement that's really an open-data movement.
The market, in short, is no longer for software, open source or proprietary. Tomorrow's market is all about data. It's therefore not surprising that O'Reilly isn't too bothered by people who consume open source without contributing back. That's a short-term phenomenon:
Free riding doesn't bother me because we do get value from it.
That's not to say that there aren't real issues with the power that is accruing to Google, Facebook, et al., but open source is science, not religion. It's pragmatic. If you close things off, eventually you lose. This is why one of my slogans is 'Create more value than you capture.' As long as people are doing that, I don't care whether they're trying to capture some value.
It's a good point, and a great reminder that many persist in fixating on all the wrong issues in open source. The licensing wars should be a thing of the past. The question is how to drive participation while building businesses that improve as participation increases. Sometimes this will result from open-source licensing, but sometimes it won't.
So long as we focus on the correct end, rather than treating open source as an end in itself, we should be OK.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Open source has proved to be phenomenally successful, and continues to grow. As open source grows beyond its roots in software infrastructure like operating systems and Web servers, however, it is finding that the types of community it attracts is increasingly corporate.
Even in the geeky application server layer, Marc Fleury notes that JBoss' "community meant users, partners, consultants," not the freedom-loving developers we often associate with open source. This is because our simplistic conception of community has likely always been wrong, as Michael Dehaan suggests.
Open source has long been more about users than developers for the simple fact that a far greater number of people know how to use software than develop it. Hence, though Richard Stallman and early proponents of open source have issued a clarion call for the developer's right to view and modify source code, the silent majority of the open-source community really only cares about the right to use and extend binary code.
So, you see Openbravo's Paolo Juvara suggesting to its open-source enterprise resource planning community that it might be advisable to extend the Openbravo system, rather than customize it. (Read: modify core source code.) Or you read Jake Goldman rightly arguing that open-source software can lead to closed platforms (e.g., if APIs are not well-documented), while proprietary platforms like Mac OS X or Salesforce.com can actually be much more open platforms, despite keeping source code closed.
In an ideal world, you'd have open source and open platforms, but not every open-source project lives up to that ideal. It's therefore not surprising that open source is growing in two different but aligned directions.
The first direction is commercial open source, which generally trades off the promise of 100 percent source-code access for a hybrid open/proprietary approach, as The 451 Group captures in a recent blog post. This is spawned by a need to frontload development with a paid community at a level of the software stack that doesn't attract a broad development community. (How many people do you know have the aptitude and interest to develop an open-source customer relationship management system? Exactly.)
The second direction is proprietary software that emulates the best of open source by keeping APIs, data, etc. open. This comprises Web 2.0 and other technologies that are open, but not necessarily in a way that would pass muster with the Open Source Initiative.
Both approaches involve openness. Both make trade-offs, and this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Jake Goldman, echoing Tim O'Reilly's suggestion that open-source licensing matters very little in the grand scheme of things, declares "it's all about platform openness and adoption, not base code openness." He's absolutely correct.
Open-source projects need to focus on more than their license. We need to improve documentation and access to APIs that make source code more usable or, even better, somewhat meaningless. Cloud computing already obviates much of the value of source-code access, a trend that I believe we'll continue to see as users demand the transparency of open source without having to muck in the code.
Such a trend is a useful "next-generation open source" because it focuses on users, not developers, with data, not code, the primary currency. So, while I'm glad to see the GIMP project discussing usability enhancements, I'd much rather see such projects finding ways to include average users in the process of development.
This has long been a weakness of OpenOffice.org, for example. I doubt most of OpenOffice.org developers do a lot of presentations, spreadsheets, and such. But the target user--someone like me--is mostly locked out of the development process by unfamiliarity with the project and no clear idea as to how to help.
Meanwhile, proprietary software like Lose It! and other social software does a far better job of including users in the "development" process by making development all about data, not source code.
In sum, proprietary software has much to learn from open source, and is increasingly applying open-source lessons of transparency and modifiability. But open source also has a lot to learn from the proprietary software world, which increasingly involves lay users in a way that open source has not.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Red Hat offering "open" IBM Lotus Domino
(Credit: Red Hat)Ah, how the mighty have fallen. In what must have been gross oversight, Red Hat is pitching proprietary software on its website under the banner of "No vendor lock-in." The way Red Hat and IBM make it appear, simply running one's software on an open platform like Linux magically removes the proprietary lock-in of the application.
I hate to say this, Red Hat, but it just doesn't work that way. Last time I checked, IBM's Lotus Domino is proprietary software and running it on Linux hasn't changed that fact.
If it did, we'd be calling Microsoft Office open source (Hey, it runs on Linux via WINE) and a whole host of other things "open" and "lock-in free."
Red Hat's positioning of IBM's software on its site is oddly out of character with the open-source leader:
... Read MoreElectronic Arts thinks the current gaming business is a quagmire of inefficiency. The solution, according to EA's head of international publishing? An open gaming platform.
...[I]ncompatible consoles made life harder for developers and consumers.
"We want an open, standard platform which is much easier than having five which are not compatible....We're platform agnostic and we definitely don't want to have one platform which is a walled garden."
Funny how different industries are increasingly coming up with the same answer to the inefficiencies that proprietary competition creates: openness. Open source. Open standards. Open competition.
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