The Business Value of Open Source Examined

jg21 writes "'Open source developers have the opportunity to influence technology that is being used by companies and do it on a global scale in a way that cannot occur with any other type of software,' contends Bill Claybrook, writing in the current issue of LinuxWorld. The article is a historical overview of the open source revolution, starting in the 80s with the GNU Project, BSD, and TCP/IP and then moving into the 90s with Red Hat, StarOffice, and coming right into the 21st century with the Ximian Desktop and Sun's Linux-based Sun Java Desktop System."

Comments

That's great and all...

[NineNine]

That's great that OSS developers can influence technology. If that's enough for you, that's great. But if I write something that influences technology on a global scale, I want something more than a pat on the back and my name buried in the source code. I want to get paid for my effort/time/expertise. I can't afford to be altruistic until I don't have to worry about making mortgage payments any more.

Re:That's great and all...

[Daniel_Staal]

Ah, but what if, by releasing it as Open Source you could get it to influence technology on a global scale, but you couldn't by releasing it in a closed-source model? What would you do then?

(And it should be pointed out that quite a few people do make a living writing Open Source software, and if you can create something great you most certainly will be able to get someone to pay you to work on it.)

The point of the article is that OSS has greater leverage than closed-source. Not really new, but neat to see documented.

Re:That's great and all...

[LWATCDR]

No one says you have too. A lot of OSS programers are working for people like IBM, Red Hat and Novell/Suse. You also can get paid for OSS software. The GPL does not prevent you from chargeing it just says that you have to include the source and not prevent others from giving away the code if they want to. Sendmail seems to make a good amount of money on GPL stuff as does RedHat. There are some sort of free software compaines out there that claim to be "free" but I do not consider them free. QT is one. You can not GPL your code under windows using a modern version of QT. BerkeleyDB is also sort of free. Not as restrictive as TrollTech but not as free as it could be
That being said I for one do not think that people that do not want to us the GPL should feel guilty at all. I do not think that OSS can work for every type of program. For some closed source is fine and for some open source is fine. I am working on some stuff I plan to release under the GPL but I am also working on some software that will be sold. here is room for both.

Re:That's great and all...

[hackstraw]

But if I write something that influences technology on a global scale, I want something more than a pat on the back and my name buried in the source code. I want to get paid for my effort/time/expertise. I can't afford to be altruistic until I don't have to worry about making mortgage payments any more.

Err, yeah, all of the OSS programmers are homeless people that write code at public libraries and on peoples computers at net cafes while they are looking in the other direction.

I mean, even RMS, who intentionally does not do mainstream modern stuff like own a television is not homeless.

In fact, I challenge you to name anyone that has influenced technology on a global scale, and can't make a mortgage payment because of their work is OSS.

And this is coming from a person that pays his mortgage by giving away free porn.

Re:That's great and all...

[pandrijeczko]

I assume you are talking about the "new economy" where the "old" economic rules doesn't exists.

No, I'm talking about a Free Software movement that has been going on seriously for some 20 years now that is more than happy to co-exist alongside commercial software.

I'm sorry to break it to you but the dot-com bubble has burst. Several years ago.

Sorry, your point is??? I thought the dot.com bubble was more about idiotic financeers overvaluing companies - what's this got to do with free/commercial software development?

You can't spent countless man-hours on man-hour intensive kind of labour (lots of manhours=high cost) like software development and make money on some low-margin side channel like customization services or support.

IBM, Novell, Red Hat, etc. seem perfectly capable of working within that model. My company, which sells telephony platforms on Linux-based systems makes a profit from services and support while developing the software in-house. I still don't see what's the problem?

That is true. They are giving something away for free that kills another persons livehood. Of cause, someone else is making something free that kills their own livehood as well.

Ah, I think I get it now. In your vision of the world, generosity and volunteer work are not allowed then on the basis that it might stop someone else profiting from it. In your world there is no room for altruism, eh?

By the same logic, rather than having the Red Cross and Oxfam goint into the Sudan with free food parcels, we send in K-Mart or ASDA (if you're in the UK) to go sell them the food. Hmmm...

I assume he does that but the commercial sector is highly affected by free products. It also drives the offshoring trend since lower labour cost is needed to counter marketloss to people who work for free.

Then how about you get your local politician /senator to speak up in the appropriate government chambers and gets a bill passed that taxes company profits heavily if they use cheap off-shore labour? In my world, a company that makes profits in a particular country should be obligated to create a certain percentage of jobs in that country also - "you take something, you give something back."

This has nothing to do with Open Source but everything to do with your commercial enterprise pandering to the rich fat shareholders.

No one has any godgiven right to live on a specific line of career and anyone can give away their own work for free of cause. But don't kid yourself, it does hurt everyone working in the industry.

So what? Virtually all of our coal-mining industry in the UK has been annihilated - not because there's no more coal to mine but because it became too expensive to mine compared to importing it (much of it from the US).

However, if I complained about that I would be a hypocrite because I also like cheaper electricity as a result of that business decision.

Sure, it sucks if you lose your livelihood but invariably it's as a result of this bigger thing called progress.

Re:That's great and all...

[einhverfr]

Open source is built for many reasons. One of the real strengths of open source software is that the community becomes the powerhouse of production rather than a single corporation. Profit is one motive that someone may bring to the community but it is not the only one. Helping customers, just plain fun, altruism, and hurting competitors are all common motivations for contributing to open source.

What I see as really funny is how often people complain about open source losing its soul because companies participate in open source to hurt their competitors. WTF? Open source development means you will have an organic self-governing network of developers which will include developers who have all manner of motivations.

This isn't about any one thing, people...

Funny, yesterday, I started a blog on this same topic (or one closely related). It is at http://ossne.blogspot.com

Let me tell you about my motivations for contributing open source software:

1) Fun of learning new technologies
2) Profit-- by minimizing the money my customers spend on software licenses, I can control more of their IT spending. First mover advantage comes into play here.
3) Hurting competitors: Microsoft, Siebel, Oracle etc. might make decent software, they are taking money I would rather get from my customers. So hurting them is good business.
4) Altruism. I actually think that freedom is a good thing. I think a world where open source software dominates would be better than one that doesn't.

So all these can co-exist.

I disagree

[Dracolytch]

I think in many cases, these kinds of effects can be seen with FREE software, instead of Open Source. Instant Messengers, for example, are mostly closed source, but have had the same kinds of wide-spread effects.

~D

What about doing both?

[Hanna's Goblin Toys]

Nmap, for instance, is GPL'd Open Source software, and it is also sold to security companies for large amounts of money under a different license.

Narrow thinking is for narrow minds.

Take it, package it, sell it, support it

[Gothmolly]

OSS is great, but many people (myself included) sometimes want it to Just Work. Look at the junk that is shovelled out of Redmond. Half-baked, half-assed authentication and directory services, insecure-by-design operating systems, no proper privilege separation, etc. etc.
But plonk down 49 USD on a USB printer and click Print, and it prints!
If I plug my USB 10/100 NIC into my laptop under RH 9, it kernel panics and dies.
If I want to use my Radeon AIW under Solaris x86, I'll be lucky to get it to even work in text mode.
The business model is to take the product and make it useful, just like a steel mill or lumber yard. Take raw material, make it accessible to the common man (consumer), who trades you the money value of his time for the product.

No business model required.

[auferstehung]

Many people ignore the fact that no business model is required for open source to be successful. Confederations of users can drive successful open source projects. Internal developers of non-software businesses pooling their resources to produce software to make their jobs easier and more productive. Apache comes to mind.

Where's the beef?

[DamnYankee]

This article fluffs over how open source is a viable business model but the "success stories" and business models described are skeletal. So where's the beef? Redhat - that no longer offers a Linux distribution, RedCarpet that has all but disappeared, Stallman and GNU - the guy that can't even afford a haircut - come on guys. If you're gonna talk about the "successful open source business model" you better put some more meat on the bone. This article makes open source look postively scary from a business perspective.

Sadly...

[xenostar]

...Open Source desktop software has been pretty stagnant in the past few years. All the great OS dekstop programs are playing catch up with their commercial relatives and most of them are lagging well behind. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge open source zealot, but it seems that innovation has been mostly confined to server related software. There are of course exceptions to this, with some truly innovative software like Dasher, but most of the flagship OS projects still feel like imitations of their popular commercial counterparts.

Poor examples of free software

[amightywind]

Ximian Desktop and Sun's Linux-based Sun Java Desktop System.

I can't say these projects come to mind when I mark progress in Free Software in the 2000's. The Ximian Desktop is arguably inferior to KDE, XFCE, and other substantial window managers, including my favorite WindowMaker. I still haven't seen Sun's Java Desktop. Come to think of it, I have never seen a usable Java Desktop program at all.

Here's my list of the seminal programs of the last three decades:

• 1980's - Emacs, GCC, GDB, GLIBC, X, HURD
• 1990's - Linux Kernel, X Desktops, Guile, Ghostscript, HURD
• 2000's - Xine, Grub, Emerge, HURD

Companies cannot nmap for free.

[Hanna's Goblin Toys]

It is a violation of the terms of the GPL to take code from nmap and place it directly into a commercial product without disclosing the source code of the commercial product. In addition, nmap has extended the GPL to cover their databases.

However, nmap can be purchased in a closed-source version that can be included into commercial products. This information can be found on their web page (insecure.org). I have not enquired as to pricing but the closed-source version of nmap probably costs about as much as a 40-50 foot cabin cruiser, appproximately. Also I would be very surprised if the updates are free.

Note that when you submit a signature to the nmap project, you forfeit copyright. This is so nmap can be sold closed-source as well as released under GPL. The Open Source, GPL authors of nmap have a good plan for becoming millionaires from the GPL model. If you are smart and innovative you can do the same.

OSS is a viable strategy against Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a commentator on the Nightly Business Report recently who didn't mention OSS but talked about the relationship between Microsoft and other computer industry companies

MS has a monopoly. The other companies don't. If MS doesn't have to worry about its monopoly (and doesn't have to spend money and time protecting it), it can raid the other companies' turf. That's what has been going on for several years.

OSS puts MS's monopoly in jeopardy. It has to spend money and time to protect the monopoly. That gives it less time and money to spend on raiding other companies' turf.

After listening to the commentator's presentation, I concluded that several companies are using OSS in exactly that way. Given recent news it looks like their strategy may be having an effect.

Why they always forget GNUstep ?

[tarzeau]

GNUstep is a free implementation of the OpenStep specification by NeXT and SUN in 1994. It is really good now. The InterfaceBuilder (Gorm) is great. The Foundation classes are finished long ago, and the AppKit works very well too. Give it a try, Live CD

Re:Late to the party!

[tmalsburg]

I once had the opportunity to talk with one of the founders of SAP. He was telling me that when they started their business, people considered it a really strange idea to sell a piece of standardised software. At that time software was tailored for every single customer. Some components for these unica were retrieved from huge open source code archives (open archive not open source).

Re:Just a few tidbits ....

[kfg]

I'm beginning to decry standards. With standards you wouldn't get the giraffe or the duck-billed platypus. OS should evolve.

ASCII is evolving into unicode. SGML has spawned HTML and XML. Open standards do not imply stagnation of standards, they imply equal access to standards, whatever they may be.

Thus allowing software to freely evolve, because standards aren't equivilent to animals, they are equivilent to the basic rules of genetic coding. DNA.

Thus we have vi/emacs/pico/OpenOffice Writer/Kword/etc

Which, because they all share the genetic standard of ASCII may interbreed to create something new.

Try that with a giraffe and a duck billed platypus.

Where open standards have the appearance of being stagnant it is usually because they have reached the level of the cockroach. What we have works well enough that there's no reason to change it.

KFG

it's all young...

[3seas]

though FOSS came along something like a decade after the introduction of proprietary consumer/commercial products, we are still talking not even thirty years old the consumer/commercial computer industry is.

That's still quite young for an industry. And there is yet to be realized any real industrialization of software development.

So what is going to happen when the level of abstraction in software development ease of doing, becomes at least a young adult? (currently its still a kid playing head games in marketing).

I think its only logical that an open base line of well established software will contine to grow. Even if it was only a matter of expiring copyrights and patents... thanks to FOSS I won't be dead and long gone when better things finally come, or at least I'll be able to experience better due an improved open base line..

A good indication of this is that MS is now being forced to improve their products due to linux competition, rather than playing non productive games.

So, its possible something will happen that changes everythings, say for example autocoding of a level that anyone who can use a calcuilator can program... leaving far more challenging innovation up to the real software engineers (rather tann the psuedo coders). In this event you have programming as a part of ones other duties...just like using a calculator...

The calculator didn't put scientist out of work, but only allowed them to even way cooler stuff...