I've written previously about how pragmatism is trumping ideology throughout open source. Not everyone considers this a good thing. But it's the reality of a development model and licensing approach that's gone mainstream, depends in no small part on corporate patronage, and is now widely viewed as simply an efficient approach to developing many types of software. What's struck me recently, however, is not just a cooling of some of the passion around open source as a social movement or alternative to commercial software. Rather, it's what feels like a general and widespread acceptance that business models built around pure play open source simply don't work for the most part.
Stuart Cohen, who used to head the Open Source Development Labs (one of the predecessors to the Linux Foundation), had this to say in BusinessWeek:
For anyone who hasn't been paying attention to the software industry lately, I have some bad news. The open-source business model is broken.
Companies have long hoped to make money from this freely available software by charging customers for support and add-on features. Some have succeeded. Many others have failed or will falter, and their ranks may swell as the economy worsens. This will require many to adopt a new mindset, viewing open source more as a means than an end in itself.
In a recent podcast, Matt Asay (GM of Americas for Alfresco) and Dave Rosenberg (co-founder of MuleSource) express a similar point of view. What's striking to me isn't just that folks with strong open-source credentials are making such statements but that, for the most part, people don't find these conclusions especially radical or contestable.
When I say "pure play open source," I'm referring to business models in which a company's products are open-source software and only open-source software. (From the context, I take it that Cohen means something similar when he refers to "the open-source business model.") Such a business model depends on selling support for open source bits given that there aren't hardware or proprietary software sales to subsidize open-source development as a sort of loss leader or complement to the stuff that really brings in the money. (IBM has perhaps most notably leveraged investments in Linux and other open-source projects in this way.) There are various tweaks on this basic approach but they all boil down to driving adoption and building community with open source and then monetizing through support contracts when the software goes into production.
It's hardly a wrong-headed idea. Plenty of companies use open-source software for many tasks and some do indeed want a single point of support for that software--especially if it's being used as part of particularly critical systems.
However, successful models aren't just about reasonable notions, or even reasonable notions that play out in practice to some degree. Rather, they're about numbers. It's not enough to sell something. You have to sell enough of it at a high enough price to turn a profit. And this is where pure play open-source approaches have mostly fallen down. Some companies buy support, but not enough do.
Most of the time, changes in the technology landscape happen gradually. Sometimes we can look back and pick out some inflection point--though, in my experience, such are more about storytelling convenience than anything more concrete. However, at least as often, things just evolve until one day we've clearly arrived in a different place.
Such is the case with open source.
It's gone from being an outsider movement to an integral component of the computer industry mainstream. However, more specifically, it's clearly entered a phase in which pragmatism, rather than idealism, is the reigning ethos.
Matthew Aslett touches on several aspects of this shift in his post: "Open source is not a business model." (His alternative title: "freedom of speech won't feed my children.") His conclusions (from a recent 451 Group report) include the following:
- The majority of open source vendors utilize some form of commercial licensing to distribute, or generate revenue from, open source software.
- Ad hoc support services are used by nearly 70% of the vendors assessed, but represent the primary revenue stream for fewer than 8% of open-source-related vendors.
- Most vendors generating revenue from open source software are reliant on direct sales staff to bring in the largest proportion of revenue.
- There is very little money being made out of open source software that doesn't involve proprietary software and services.
- ...the fact is there are few vendors generating revenue from open source software that are following a pure open source approach when it comes to developing all of their code in the open and licensing all of their software under open source licenses.
In short, as Matthew puts it: "Open source is a software development and/or distribution model that is enabled by a licensing tactic." That's a far cry from open source as social movement or belief system as predominated early on and still has its adherents today. That's not to say that open-source proponents ever fit neatly into a single mold; Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, was always more the pragmatist than the Free Software Foundation's Richard Stallman, for example. However, in the main, we've clearly shifted to a locale where even those who are predisposed to "Software Freedom" as a concept are more willing than in the past to treat open source as just one mechanism among several to develop and distribute software.
In my view, there are a variety of reasons for this change including the following:
Open source has, in a sense, won. By which I mean that it's entered the mainstream and has, to no small degree, heavily influenced how companies do development, engage with user and developer communities, and provide access to their products. Furthermore, the well-established success of many open-source projects (Linux, Apache, Samba... the list is long) makes many of the long-ago barbs thrown at open source (insecure, risky, unsupported, etc.) risible in today's world. Open-source advocates no longer need to jumpstart a software revolution. They can afford to be pragmatic.
And open source has "won" because it's proven to be a good model for development and collaboration in many cases. A lot of the fervor around open-source licensing debates was effectively predicated on a belief that open source had to be protected from those who would strip mine it for commercial ends and kill it in the process. However, today there are plenty of examples of open-source projects that use BSD-ish, anything goes licenses--yet are hugely successful. There remain a variety of implications to using different license types, but we're once again talking more about practical matters than philosophical ones. Few major software companies (including Microsoft) don't intersect with open source to at least some degree.
Business models have had time to play out. At the same time, it's also proven to be the case that, building a sustainable and scalable business around a pure open-source play tends not to work. Many open-source companies have gone down the sell-support-for-the-open-source-bits path. The problem is that not enough customers buy up to the pay version. Thus, companies whose product is built around an open-source project have increasingly moved towards offering proprietary plug-in modules, hosted services, and things of that nature. (MySQL, now part of Sun, being just one example.)
Finally, two words: cloud computing--a term I use to refer generally to running software in the network, rather than locally. Cloud computing is shaping up to be a huge consumer of open-source software. The ease of licensing, the ability to customize, the ability to try things out quickly, and--yes--costs that tend to be lower than proprietary software, all make open source and the cloud a good fit. And cloud computing, beginning with its early consumer-oriented Web 2.0 guises, is where a lot of computing is headed over the coming years.
Richard Stallman, among other open-source purists, has decried this shift because he sees it as a move back to proprietary, centralized computing. There are some legitimate concerns about data portability, privacy, and other user rights in a cloud context. However, to narrowly and uncompromisingly focus on open source's historical roots and structure in a cloud-based world is to both tilt at windmills and re-fight a different war with the weapons and tactics of the last one. Pragmatism isn't necessarily compromise; it's adapting to the world as it is, not as you wish it would be.
Assessing the open-source scorecard is complicated. A complete "state of open source" would fill many pages. But here are a few things that have struck me over the past year or two.
Large swaths of open source have become mainstream--to the point of invisibility. Jay Lyman summed this up well in the context of the last LinuxWorld. We've also seen large vendors, such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM, generally de-emphasizing Linux and open source as businesses in their own right.
Just to be clear, invisible is absolutely not the same thing as irrelevant. However, some open-source fans who feel the need to ally themselves with a highly visible movement taking on "the enemy" find this shift troubling. (See, for example, "Mike's" comment to the aforementioned blog post.)
Pure-play open source as a standalone business has largely proven to be marginal. There are many successful companies that leverage open source in various ways. But it's the cross-selling of other things--systems, proprietary software, and services, in the case of system vendors, or advertising, in the case of Google--that brings in most of the revenue.
Basic pay-for-support models tend to have low conversion rates and haven't mostly been big moneymakers. (Essentially a form of "FREE 3," to use Chris Anderson's terminology.) I discussed this point earlier in "Does Open Source Have More Value Within a Larger Vendor?"
The Linux desktop remains a niche. There was a time when the desktop looked to be the next great frontier for Linux. That hasn't happened. Ironically, Apple Macs, which are arguably even less open than Windows PC, have been the big desktop winners over the past few years--not Linux.
The record for open source more broadly on the desktop is mixed. The Firefox Web browser has been the poster child for open-source client success. But other projects, such as OpenOffice.org, have been better at pressuring proprietary software vendors on various fronts (standards, pricing) than at emerging as big winners in their own right. And, today, the action has moved far more toward mobile clients (where Linux is starting to have some degree of uptake) and in software running "in the network" than in the traditional "fat desktop" client operating system.
Which brings us to the next point. There's a tension between cloud computing and open source. I cover that tension in much more detail in "The Cloud vs. Open Source" but essentially, most of the open-source licenses that were written to require that modifications and enhancements to open-source software be contributed back to the commons don't apply when software is distributed only in the form of network services, rather than directly in the form of the software bits themselves.
More broadly, as the Free Software Foundation's Richard Stallman has been lately complaining, the very idea of the cloud can be seen as conflicting with "Software Freedom" principles, to which open source was a means and not an end.
Yet for all those points that are either in the debit column or that some would place there, it's hard for me to see how open source could be considered as anything other than a great success. As a model for how software is developed and how people collaborate, open source has utterly transformed IT.
Even when open source hasn't displaced proprietary alternatives, it's helped make things like open beta testing and trial versions commonplace--ubiquitous, even. When was the last time you, as a consumer, bought a software program without giving it a spin first? For me, it's been a long time. Yet buy-before-try used to be the norm.
That open source has fully inserted itself into the mainstream as a result strikes me as a feature, not a bug.
I'm out at JavaOne in San Francisco this week and one discussion I've heard popping up with some regularity is, "Do we need to do something to protect open source in a cloud computing world?" I've written about aspects of this topic at length previously. However, given that this is an area that is buzzing up a bit, I thought it would be useful to boil down the key issues and give my personal take.
The nub
Copyleft licenses, such as the GPL used for the Linux kernel and the majority of other open-source projects, require that the source code for enhancements and other modifications to GPLd code be made available to the commons if the modified software is distributed. Distribution is the key here. If the modified code is only used within a company, that's not distribution. Germane to our purposes here, neither is access to services provided by that code over a network. In other words, offer access to a CRM or content management system built from a GPL foundation solely in the form of a hosted service and there you can make any proprietary changes or extensions you like and there's no requirement that you make the source code for those available.
A loophole?
Some view this as a simple loophole to be plugged. The GPL was originally written very much within the context of Unix programmatic and operating system interfaces. Therefore, the reasoning goes, the only reason the GPL didn't encompass access via Web services is that there were no Web services--at least in anything like their current form--when the GPL was created. That the new GPLv3 specifically doesn't address this "loophole" either was more a matter of practicality than principle by this view.
And, in fact, one approach to eliminating this loophole is a straightforward enough approach. The Affero GPL is a straightforward extension to the GPLv3 license that essentially expands the definition of distribution to encompass the delivery of services over the network.
Questionable assumptions
My take is that the "cloud computing as loophole" school of thought rests on some questionable assumptions.
The big implicit assumption is that without adequate license protections, corporations will strip mine open source and the entire communal development process will just wither away over time. A favorite proof point in favor of this argument is how Linux (which uses the copyleft GPL license) largely triumphed over BSD Unix (which predates Linux and was more capable early on, but which uses a far more permissive license that doesn't place any restrictions on proprietary extensions or use).
However, BSD has a lot of problems as an exemplar. Early BSD development was mired in all manner of fractious argument between distributions (before they were called that) and, certainly not least, a prolonged legal battle with AT&T, which owned the Unix copyrights at the time. It is, therefore, an open historical question whether the GPL was the magic ingredient that led Linux to success or whether all manner of legal, community, and timing matters weren't ultimately much more important. And, in support of the contrary view, I'd note that Linux aside, some of the most important open-source projects--such as Apache--do use BSD or BSD-like licenses.
Even more fundamentally, I see more than a little contradiction when some of the strongest open-source advocates argue that open source needs licenses that protect it thoroughly. After all, if open source truly is a superior model for development and adoption, aren't companies that go down the proprietary path only hurting themselves?
Practical problems
Finally, I see extending the concept of distribution to cover Web services as problematic from a practical perspective. Distribution in the GPLv2 and GPLv3 licenses draws (mostly) a hard-edged line. If you're an enterprise using software internally, anything goes. If you're using GPL code in software you're selling to the public--whether downloaded, on a CD, or in embedded firmware--you must make the relevant sources available. However, as more and more companies of every stripe make parts of their computing infrastructure available to their customers--think online banking, for example--where does it end? The boundaries become very fuzzy--which would inject lots of uncertainty into just about any use of open source in an enterprise environment.
Ultimately, as folks such as Tim O'Reilly and Simon Phipps have discussed, there are many other issues of "freedom" in a cloud computing world. Matters of data portability and privacy for example.
For my part, I'd argue that open source has demonstrated that it can stand on its own without heroic measures to prop it up. Sure, continue to evangelize the benefits of open source and maybe even take a stick to any gross violators. But the more interesting, and important, questions lie elsewhere.
When my posting frequency drops a bit, the usual reason is that I'm flying here and yon and otherwise occupied with goings-on at some conference, meeting, or client engagement. The situation in January was a bit different. For the first time in a while, I had some decent blocks of uncommitted time. And I put those to use fleshing out and writing some longer research notes that had been sitting on the to-do list for way too long.
Two of these deal with so-called "cloud computing"--the idea that software will increasingly run in the network. These were originally planned as a single paper, but for structural and length reasons, I decided to break out the definitional piece, "Defining Cloud Computing." To tell the truth, I don't typically find formal taxonomies and categorizations especially interesting, but I thought it useful in this case to be clear about the topic under discussion.
The main research note, "The Cloud vs. Open Source," focuses on the relevancy of open source in a cloud computing world--and, especially, whether other types of protections and rights may not be more important than the right to view, modify, and redistribute source code. Tim O'Reilly has written and spoken on this topic.
At the just-concluded Sun Analyst Summit, I also had the opportunity to broach this topic with Simon Phipps, Sun's Open Source Officer. An interesting perspective that he added is that we're really talking about two different kinds of rights. One is essentially individual--the right for me to decide who can access what "data" that I "own" (whatever those terms mean exactly) and to transfer my data from one place to another. However, there's also the idea of what I'll call community or collective rights--the idea of reciprocal obligations associated with providing application programming interfaces and access.
One follow-up piece that I want to write when I have time will be something along the lines of "Why Not the Cloud?" in which I'll look at some of the inhibitors to moving computing into the network.
Finally, "The Future of the Operating System" looks at how changes in the way that we operate computers and deploy applications is starting to change how we view the operating system, a technology construct that, in important ways, hasn't really changed for decades. Server virtualization is the big driving force behind change here. However, virtualization is hardly unrelated to cloud computing--both through services like Amazon EC2 and, more conceptually, in the fact that virtualization is all about masking lower-level details from users.
These three Illuminata research notes are all available as free samples.
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