The Open Road

The logic of open source is increasingly clear to a growing number of businesses. Ironically, however, that logic generally dovetails with a recognition of how to marry open source with a proprietary revenue driver.

Once you figure out the scarce good for which customers will pay, open sourcing everything else becomes a no-brainer.

Google, Red Hat, and a wide variety of other businesses have all discovered this. So has Nokia, as Glyn Moody writes:

...Once (Sebastian Nyström, vice president of application and service frameworks in Nokia's Devices unit) laid out the logic of moving to open source, there was very little resistance within the company to doing so. I think that's significant; it means that, just as the GNU GPL has been tested in various courts and found valid, so the logic behind open source--that openness allows software to spread further, and improve quicker, for the mutual benefit of all--is also increasingly accepted by hard-headed business people: it's become self-evident that it's a better way.

Sort of. What's becoming self-evident is that open source is a fantastic way to drive community value, which funnels prospective customers into purchasing proprietary value born of scarcity. Whether Google AdWords or Red Hat Network, it's the same phenomenon.

In other words, it's not that businesses have bought into the ideological allure of freedom. It's that freedom can more efficiently create a large base of prospective customers for something else.

Moody cites IBM as an example of a company that has seen the light on the benefits of open source. Indeed it has. Open source enables IBM to sell billions...in proprietary hardware, not to mention the billions in proprietary software sold on the back of open-source software, as IBM's Savio Rodrigues articulates:

In the WebSphere division, we contribute to countless open source projects, including the Apache HTTPD, Dojo Toolkit, and Eclipse Equinox projects. We then utilize code from these projects with IBM enhancements inside of WebSphere Application Server. This strategy allows us to do more with less.

Indeed, I'd argue that such open-source software commitments are easier when a company has a clear proprietary strategy to justify and monetize them.

That's why it's easy for Web 2.0 companies to shovel money into open-source development communities: open source channels more customers of their (closed) cloud offerings.

It's also why we see more vendors turn to investing in (e.g., IBM in Apache) or founding (e.g., IBM in Eclipse) open-source communities, rather than controlling their own, self-branded projects, a trend highlighted on Thursday by The 451 Group's Matt Aslett. Vendors that have proprietary selling points elsewhere don't need to control open-source code.

Cynical? No. Businesses aren't charitable organizations.

Even Google. Even MySQL. Even Red Hat. Most people tend to forget how irate "the community" became when Red Hat introduced Red Hat Advanced Server and stopped supporting its consumer customers. Red Hat was forgetting "the people" to serve "the Man."

Years later, Red Hat is considered the paragon of open-source virtue. And well it should be: Red Hat is particularly good at balancing the hard-headed realism of profits with the idealism of open-source software.

As more companies discover the strategic, pragmatic advantages of open source, we'll see even more of it. As Gartner's Brian Prentice correctly argues, "While the romantic open source narrative is failing, Open Source continues to get stronger."

For many of us, open source's allure has always been about William James pragmatism, not Richard Stallman idealism. Yes, you need the idealism to keep pragmatism honest, but without the "logic" of money (and IBM's initial $1 billion commitment to Linux), open source would never have become the global phenomenon that it is today.

For years, open-source advocates like myself have fixated on freedom. "Don't get locked in!" has been our rallying cry to the teeming masses, yearning to be free from the shackles of proprietary lock-in. "Stop feeding your firstborn sons to the beast in Redmond!"

At Tuesday's Open Source Forum in London, however, "freedom" took a back seat to cost reduction, performance, and IT efficiency. Not surprisingly, the message was even more warmly received, and probably will result in far greater uptake of open-source software than the freedom cry.

The reason is simple: people get paid to get work done. The chief information officer of Company X has a job to do, and that job doesn't entail weekday freedom fighting, battling software overlords down on Canary Wharf. Rather, her job is to make the IT trains run on time, and while open source likely plays an increasingly prominent role in this, its importance has less to do with high ideals than high performance.

Open source, in other words, is winning because it works, not because it's saving the planet.

Some persist in selling technology, open source and otherwise, based on ideology. That's why Opera's "Freedom!" message for Opera Unite falls so flat, as Chris Messina points out:

What I find so fascinating about this marketing message is that it presumes that owning one's own data and "connecting directly" with friends is somehow relevant to people - as though it's a big problem that people have been complaining about for years, and that Opera has finally answered the call.

But I think they're missing the big picture here - or intentionally obscuring it -which is that, while the idea of owning your own data may be attractive to neo-libertarians and open source geeks - most people really don't care and are happy to outsource storage of their data to someone else who can be responsible for backing up their data and fending off hackers. 200 million Facebook users can't be wrong, right?

The appeal for this sort of message is so limited as to be nearly useless. Tim O'Reilly recently suggested that open sourcerers often fixate on the wrong thing (licensing), overlooking the real promise and mechanics for ensuring openness on the Web (data, APIs, participation, etc.).

Add to that the wrong message ("You have nothing to lose but your chains!") and you have a recipe for reaching a niche audience. Open source can do better.

Freedom is important, but if Iran has taught us anything, it's that there are far more important freedoms in this world than the right to modify software.

It's time for the marketing message around open source to move beyond "and justice for all." Cost savings, performance boosts, etc. are far more relevant to likely adopters of open source. Such open-source customers are less concerned by the intricacies of open-source business models than they are by tangible returns on their open-source investments.

It's the new open-source pragmatism. Try it, you might like it.

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