The Open Group's New Open Source Strategy

Bruce Perens writes "The Open Group hasn't always had the best reputation in the Open Source community, mostly because of their handling of Motif, which remained proprietary for much too long. But there's no arguing with the success of our community, and now the Open Group leadership understands that their organization must be fully involved in Open Source... or it's time for them to change their name. To that end, the Open Group contracted me to develop an Open Source strategy for their organization. The draft strategy has been published and they are requesting comment. - Bruce"

Comments

Motif?

[Ed Avis]

Huh? I thought Motif still was proprietary, even to this day. Or at least, it is proprietary software in the sense of not being free software. Or was there some big announcement I missed?

Is Open Source Good for All of Our Members?

[billstr78]

This is a very good question. The trend that Open Source software seems to encorage is a gradual but irreversable shift away from propriatary and profiting methods. As stated in the strategy, this is good for the majority (users) and bad for the minority (vendors). The question is wether or not this method of software development is sustainable if it's popularity grew to a point where it was the majority method of development.

Some would say that it would be great. Everything would be free, innovation would happen at a rapid rate, but what about compensation for the developers. Software written under a GLP type licience, does not leave room for profits from the actual software. Ad-hoc services can only go so far to support an entire development effort. Who pays the developers for thier hard work?

The question I leave open for disucssion is this: How sustainable do you think Open Source in it's current form is and do you think that varients such as the Apache Licience are an innevatable change necessary for the properity of the community.

Re:Is Open Source Good for All of Our Members?

[Delphiki]

If Open Source were the only software solution there would become a lack of demand for paid developers. Sure there ar epoeple who make a living developing for open source but they are in the minority. So if the lack of demand for developers went down the people who currently work on open source projects as a hobby who are programmers would largely have to move to another profession to be able to support themselves. This fallout in the demand for software developers would cause a shift away from software development in education. Sure, some people would still study computer science, but many, many less. So the pool of hobbyist developers would grow smaller and drop in skill level. This would most likely cause a great deal of stagnation on open source projects, leaving a wide opening for closed source software to move quickly back into the market by being able to afford the best developers full time, not just as hobbyists. So basically, the way I see it, open source is dependant upon closed source, just as closed source software is dependant on open source software frequently.

Re:Is Open Source Good for All of Our Members?

[pjack76]

Well, my job right now is basically to support my organization's systems. If the accounting system goes wonky, I call the vendor to address it. If our in-house web intranet thingy goes wonky, I fix it. If a WinNT4.0 desktop goes wonky, I explain that we are all powerless to do anything, let's go have a drink.

My point is that in an all-open-source world, I would still have a job: I'd be answering user's requests and fixing bugs for them. I just wouldn't have to call vendors anymore, and I could actually fix a desktop too.

Re:Is Open Source Good for All of Our Members?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, system admins would still have jobs.

But, what about hard core hackers? You know the type of people currently developing the systems you support.

Re:Is Open Source Good for All of Our Members?

[MAXOMENOS]

If Open Source were the only software solution there would become a lack of demand for paid developers Most of the software development happening today is for code that runs in house, so that businesses can handle their accounting, inventory, transportation and personnel needs. This will still be the case down the road, regardless of whether the dominant commercial software model is proprietary, open-source, or public domain.

They're going to need coders to develop that software, and those coders ain't gonna work for free.

Granted, this means that there's less work available to develop one-size-fits all solutions for word processing, operating systems, databases, compilers, etc. But, frankly, the market for these items is pretty crowded as it is anyway.

Re:Is Open Source Good for All of Our Members?

[73939133]

The trend that Open Source software seems to encorage is a gradual but irreversable shift away from propriatary and profiting methods. As stated in the strategy, this is good for the majority (users) and bad for the minority (vendors). The question is wether or not this method of software development is sustainable if it's popularity grew to a point where it was the majority method of development.

No, that is not the question. The 40-70% profit margins achieved by vendors are clearly unsustainable--they can't exist in an efficient market. Open source software just happens to be the mechanism by which this market finally starts operating efficiently.

How sustainable do you think Open Source in it's current form

You are viewing open source software as some kind of alternative to proprietary development, but it is not. Rather, it is a stage in the evolution of a software market segment.

Something like the UNIX kernel used to cost lots of money because it provided functionality that was not widely available. But it was natural for it eventually to become open source. Ditto for software like Wordperfect and Microsoft word: initially, people could charge a premium for it because few people offered it (let's not get into the fact that the technology was invented elsewhere), but (absent monopolistic barriers), something like OpenOffice now gives you the same functionality for free.

You can make a big profit on some innovative piece of software for a few years, but then it gets commoditized and your price will go down from competition. Software is different from other goods there because it really has no physical component; generic drugs, electronics, etc., still have a non-zero cost even if there is no intellectual property. That's why it is ultimately open source programmers, not no-name manufacturers, that are driving software prices down, and in fact are driving them to how much it costs to make another unit of product: zero.

In short, open source software is sustainable--it's pretty much inevitable in an efficient market. The only thing that can kill it is government interference in the market or monopolistic practices.

Re:Is Open Source Good for All of Our Members?

[Bruce Perens]

Most GPL developers these days are paid.

There is nothing wrong with India if you live there. But some people are going to be concerned if jobs are moving out of wherever those people are.

In this particular case I think it is the US own fault because we haven't maintained a strong educational tradition among our own people, our primary schools are underfunded and substandard, and we don't do a good job at keeping our minorities in school, and interested in school.

But I digress...

Bruce

Re:Is Open Source Good for All of Our Members?

[krisbrowne42]

It goes both ways. Some open souce software innovates. Some copies. And some copies an idea and expands it in innovative ways (OpenOffice did XML-based files before M$ started following with Office 2k3.)

Re:Is Open Source Good for All of Our Members?

[pyrrho]

they can also start within companies for whome they are crucial. They don't HAVE to be open sourced in that case, do they?

Don't buy the arrogance that one-size-fits-all early-to-market hackware is the best software engineering that can be done. I've done a lot of hard core original development --- clients for consumer oriented net services, etc. Of course, none of these has been open source, but they were not really "shrink" wrap either in the sense that even when the client software was put in boxes and wrapped in shrinkwrap, you still had to pay for the service.

Sometimes software engineers forget they make tools, the value is really in the use the tools are put to... which of course is one reason for the terrible quality in software today.

imnsho.

OSF/1?

[emil]

Didn't The Open Group do an entire UNIX implementation (the only implementation of which was Digital OSF/1|UNIX|Tru64)?

If so, how much of this could they open? Anything useful in it?

Open for business.

[ratfynk]

There does need to be a business community developed among Open Source, and the very idea free not as in free beer. To go about bashing (even if you are a born again basher) those who seriously try to make a living with technology is just stupid.

The best possible way to accomplish this is to set a model of co-operative enterprise that todays over-blown corporate despots cannot compete with. If you study nature co-operative systems invariably will out compete when up against closed single modeled systems. The fundamentals of this are already in the GPL which will go down in history as one of the great documents of our time. Along with other human social documents like the Magna Carta. RMS really is a visionary.

The OpenGroup is the Cathedral and irrelevant

[GGardner]

The Open Group has been pretty much irrelevant for the last 5 years, not because they have been closed source, but because they are a Cathedral style closed source. Both Gnome and KDE have become far, far superior to Motif in a far shorter amount of time. What role is there to play for a centralized standards-blessing body in the world of the distributed, bazaar-style development?

Re:Viral

[73939133]

No. Open source licenses like BSD impose almost no restrictions on you and don't affect any of your own source code.

Free software licenses like GPL might be described as "viral". But if the GPL is viral, many commercial software licenses are even more "viral".

If you care about your IP, you have to be careful no matter what license you agree to, whether it is the GPL or a Microsoft EULA. And it certainly isn't hard to preserve your IP and still use GPL'ed software if you spend the same amount of effort on it as you do on a commercial license.

Re:An added strategy

[defile]

Worries about open source being profitable forget that open source lasted plenty long without profitability.

Open source and business have gone hand-in-hand from the start. What's different today is that you have a few companies trying to turn it into a shrinkwrap product.

Whether those endeavors succeed or fail is irrelevant to open source in itself.

Re:An added strategy

[Bruce Perens]

I think SCO is a member, too. Open Group is not vendor-dominated, as far as I can tell. They have lots of large corporate users in their membership, some government agencies (including DOD/DISA), etc.

And regarding Sun, specifically, Sun has a multiple-personality disorder where Free Software is concerned. They help us with one hand and hurt with the other. This is also true for IBM, Intel, and HP. They have an internal conflict of interest that they won't be able to resolve in this decade. The best we can do is live with it.

Bruce

Yet Another Damn Open License

[RevMike]

I've given a lot of thought to the balance of proprietary and open code.

I'd like to suggest a "mixed open" license. I envision this kind of interaction between open and proprietary code.

• The origianl owner would release software (binary and source code) under the "mixed open" license.
• Others would be free to run, modify, and redistribute the software. Distributors may not charge a fee for the software, except for costs associated with distribution. Binary distributors would be required to also offer for free or for distribution cost the source code. Distributors can sell support or value added services.
• The original owner, or his proprietary licensees, can develop and sell proprietary versions of the code.
• Proprietary distributors can integrate enhancements and big fixes made by the community royalty free, but must respect the following conditions in doing so...
• Proprietary distributors must contribute further enhancements and bug fixes to community contributed code back to the community.
• Proprietary distributors must provide integrated community code in source code form, such that the user can modify said code and relink it with proprietary code in object form. Users could not be prevented from linking in one program proprietary modules from multiple sources.

The goal here is to have the maximum number of developers, both open and proprietary, developing and enhancing the same codebase. Once a piece of code is open, it must remain open, but open code can be mixed with proprietary code.

Imagine that AT&T/USL had open-sourced SVR4 under this model many years ago.

First, it would have preempted the development of BSD and Linux, since the goals of those development communities could have been met within the framework of the AT&T code.

Second, hardware vendors could produce versions customized to their hardware by licensing SVR4 directly from USL. In attempting to maximize ROI, they are likely to keep in lock step with the community version except for those drivers needed for their specific hardware. They would not have to fear loss of the trade secrets in their hardware or drivers.

In the long term, there would be one common open code base, available free, designed to work with generic or common hardware. There would then be small subsets of code, perhaps available for a price, designed to take advantage of specific hardware or do very customized tasks.

So Intel would license a SVR4 distribution that was 99% open, but has a few custom modules designed to take advantage of special features in their Dual-XEON configuration. They would sell or more likely offer it free to their hardware customers. Meanwhile NVidia sells a distirbution customized for their video cards. The end user takes some modules from each and links them with his own customized kernel.