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The Open Code Market
The Open Code Market
The peer reviewed magazine FirstMonday has published one paper I wrote on the business possibilities of Open Source titled "The Open Code Market".
In short, The Open Code Market aims to become a Free Market for software, as well as a market for Free Software. The OCM introduces into the Free/Open Source movement an economic incentive, to help align the priorities of Free/Open Source developers with those of the end users.
Between the final draft and publication, I received many valuable comments on the idea. I am very grateful to all those who dedicated some of their valuable time to read the paper and make insightful comments.
Some of those comments led me to an earlier similar effort by Brian Behlendorf named SourceXchange (originally at www.sourcexchange.com). After contacting Brian, his comments were probably the most valuable, since he had gone through the the actual proces of running a project similar to what I am proposing.
His main line was that:
a) while the market made profits, it did not reach the levels of profitability that were expected in the middle of the dot.com boom, and investors looked for other (more lucrative) endevours
b) That the dot.com boom also addedd costs (high salaries, etc) to his attempt and
c) that it is difficult to commoditise software creation due to the uncertainties over time / effort required to write the software, and the difficulty of the role of "project manager".
My line on all this is that
- The project may be easier to develop now as expectations for profits (and costs) have decreased, and that sourcing on low-cost countries (i.e. India, Vietnam, etc.) would reduce costs significantly.
- I also expect that the market will take off only as Free Software/Open Source (Linux in particular) moves to the mass market of the desktop, thus generating the necessary economies of scale, visibility and consumer-mass. In my idea, the target end-users of the market are not IT companies, but mainly individuals with no IT knowled (nor desire to acquire it) and Small and Medium Enterprises with small or no IT departments.
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Not only did I have this idea, I even wrote it up in a paper for a college class a year ago. It's the same not only in spirit (a commission system for building programs and adding features, the result being open to all), but in the particulars as well (regulation of the market by a for-profit "third party" entity and so on). Not that I'm complaining; rather, I'm glad to see that somebody has the guts to try it.
As for the challenge of getting Linux and OSS on desktops, the standard approach appears to be to try and sell Linux and OSS as a bundle, and to get people to shift over all at once. I personally don't think this is the right approach. The easiest OSS programs to convince people to use are the ones that have Windows as well as Linux versions.
Right now I use Mozilla for browsing, the GIMP for image editing, and free (though perhaps not Free) programs for AVI reencoding and archive compression and retrieval - and I'm a Windows user. If I were able to use Free software for everything I normally do in Windows, and all of those programs also had Linux versions, I'd switch.
However, I'm stuck in Windows because I'm a gamer, and a lot of games don't have Linux versions (or Mac ones for that matter). If the zealots (you know who you are) went after the game designers to port their code, you'd get me on Linux no problem.