There is No Open Source Community 367
porkrind writes "There is no Open Source Community is an Onlamp article about the economics of open source and how most people get it wrong. Really, open source is much more about supply and demand than it is about an activist community or individual drivers (individuals or individual companies) affecting change on society." From the article: "Taking the position that individuals have pushed open source forward leads to the conclusion that a core group of ideological 'believers' is necessary for the continued success of open source software. Businesses unaware of the falsehood of this claim are too afraid of running afoul of the 'open source community' and sometimes make decisions that are not in their financial interests. Both open source-based and proprietary software vendors need to challenge these assumptions."
The Corporate Nightmare & Employee Torture (Score:5, Interesting)
Allow me to provide some anecdotal evidence of this fear. I work at Corporation X. I'm assigned to a project that requires me to program quite a bit of Java from scratch. So I download the latest version of Java and try to install it. No dice. I need a system administrator because only the JRE is on there, not the JDK. I e-mail my manager that it's going to be tough
So this FOSS department gives me a business process to follow which contains 31 steps that I have to push paperwork through. I say screw it and attempt to befriend a system administrator. About as far as I got was asking him to put the JDK, Apache Ant and Eclipse on my computer
What were they doing in that time? Highly paid lawyers were sitting around a desk grilling my manager about what this software would be used for. Then they debated whether or not someone could come after Corporation X in the future if they learned that their editor was used to create a project.
My frustrations abound in the corporate world but after what SCO pulled, maybe this insane precaution is necessary?
I can't help but smile at the wad of dough next to this articles on the homepage as whoever made that the icon for this category had no idea how much it applies here.
I agree one 100% (Score:5, Interesting)
"Taking the position that individuals have pushed open source forward leads to the conclusion that a core group of ideological 'believers' is necessary for the continued success of open source software."
Take the formation and continuation of the United States.
Certainly it was started by a small group of ideologically and personally "strong" individuals, a core group that got the ball rolling. But today, the country has reached a critical mass that although could be unravelled, seems to be for the most part on autopilot.
Re:The Corporate Nightmare & Employee Torture (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, the speed of the process is a matter for your corporation. But the precautions? Yes, absolutely necessary. Remember that by using hte software, you are agreeing to a license of some kind (GPL, Apache...whatever). If you are an officer of the company, you have just created a legal obligation for your corporation. One it might not have had any plans to take on.
So yes, clearance of the license is required and sensible. This is the case for any license - open-source, proprietory, anything. Just because you can get the software immediately downloaded and installed without shelling out cash doesn't make it any less of a risk.
Cheers,
Ian
Fear and Avoidance (Score:2, Interesting)
My experience so far has been with IT management who seem to fear the unknowns of 'free' software.
There is a basic lack of ability to evaluate the product as a product and not based on it's source and/or lack of marketing.
It seems that managers (and I've heard this from them before) think that when you get something for free you get what you pay for. Suggesting that it isn't valuable because they don't pay for it.
Case in point:
Fairly recently during the initial feature investigation phases of a fairly large development project myself & 2 of the developers (I am a Buisness Systems Analyst/QA person) were recommending MYSQL over Oracle as the licensing cost (this was just before the announcement of OracleXE) for a few hundred clients was going to be in the order of 100K to 300K.
We told them that there is excellent support for it for only 5K/year.
Essentially the response was "Eventhough it is much slower we will go with SQL Server because it's licensing is only 80K for the server".
Interesting business decisions... what happend to return on investment?
Fortunately Oracle XE saved the additional hundreds of thousands so we still have a high performance database option. And we could have had MYSQL 5.0 for 5K a year that performs in some ways better than Oracle (which I think we still paid 50K for).
am I missing something? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've seen some open source programs out there then the commercial alternatives as well, after talking to developers, and people who work with and use this stuff, and even go that extra step of helping new users I think says there is a community, Linux User groups are a form of community people sharing idea's and supporting each other in linux. Am I wrong?
As Cantor and Siegal said (Score:3, Interesting)
Not that I'd ever have seen them, it not being my religion, but when I was young, I used to read about fire&brimstone (tm) preachers inveighing against the worship of Mammon (aka the almighty dollar); these days, it's the state religion of the US.
mark
I, Pencil (Score:2, Interesting)
Milton Friedman had to say about this essay:
Leonard Read's delightful story, "I, Pencil," has become a classic, and deservedly so. I know of no other piece of literature that so succinctly, persuasively, and effectively illustrates the meaning of both Adam Smith's invisible hand--the possibility of cooperation without coercion--and Friedrich Hayek's emphasis on the importance of dispersed knowledge and the role of the price system in communicating information that "will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do."
People cooperate without coersion on open source projects. There are a variety of reasons why they may do so, one of which is certainly... Economics.
Fascetious Tripe (Score:3, Interesting)
That individual actors have had a tremendous impact on every aspect of modern technological development is obvious to anyone with even a cursory familiarity with the relevant history.
Beyond that, cultural and, I dare say, moral aspects of the technology *have* played a significant role in the adoption of open source methodologies and software, particularly at the academic level. Adoption at the academic level has been, if not a driving force, a necesarry condition for widespread adoption in the corporate sector. The talking heads the author discusses may have provided some needed business-speak triggers to make corporate types more comfortable, but that's hardly important or interesting. Richard Stallman was merely a figurehead for impersonal economic forces, but Bruce Perens has changed history? Please.
So the author's description of history is inaccurate - it is, in fact, anti free software propoganda, and unsurprisingly rooted in the same neo-hagelian ideas as most intrinsically anti-democratic tracts.
However, the course of action he proposes - which is not a challenge of assumptions, as he characterizes it, but a change in policy - is worth independent consideration.
The author thinks that corporate america should move forward with an open source development model and ignore the input and wishes of the broader community of developers - the author of the piece insists they don't exist.
Any corporation that wishes to do this is, of course, free to do so. The question for free software/open source/whatever developers is this - do you want your interests represented, or not? Individual actors have tremendous influence over the course of events from this point onward - and it is pointless to speculate on the outcome of events when individual decisions play such a decisive role.
A software developer trying to accomplish option 1 on his own will face a daunting task, whereas a developer who releases source code, assuming the project is viable, will have a ready supply of suggestions for improving the software and adding features. - This is generally true. But how, exactly, does it follow from the elementary economic forces that the author thinks drive open source? It doesn't - it derives from the existence of the broader community, about which the author urges corporate developers to "stop worrying".
The discussion of legal pitfalls and the economic advantages of scale and so forth are mostly accurate (as other posters have addressed), it is the conclusions that he draws from them with which I disagree.
Re:Its a trap (Score:2, Interesting)
My application hopes to produce a product of equal or greater quality, be released open source, and charge only for implementation, support, and custom modules. All custom modules will also be released open source, giving greater incentive for future customers to switch. If an organization creates their own module, they may submit the code for my company to review, clean up, document, and completely understand. At this point, they will receive a discount in support, and their custom module will be supported and offered as an Open Source module for other organizations to use free of charge.
In the end, my open source license makes for a more attractive package, and makes more organizations want to switch. I will make more money in the long run, and will provide a better quality product as well. Had this been closed source, nobody would have a reason to switch, and the incentive to create new modules for my company would be low to non-existant.
While the other company makes more money per sale, I am hoping to make more sales and focus more on creating better modules that meet the needs of my customers. Happy customers tip big, dissatisfied customers jump ship. While it is possible to satisfy customers with closed source applications, it is easier and more flexible with open source.
A clearly marked mission statement, terms and conditions, and license agreement should cut through 90% of lawyer fees, and should make for a quicker implementation at most large scale corporations. Licensing fees would be non-existant, and there would be no penalties for having too many copies, which accounts for a majority of software-based lawsuits.
Oversimplified (Score:3, Interesting)
I have argued many of the same arguments in the past. FLOSS development is merely a consortium for software development. As long as your core business does not rely on revenue from the software developed (i.e. virtually every company in existence) you are better off entering into a consortium for software development. Especially if the overhead costs for that consortium are (mostly) free (enter the internet).
What people fail to realize is that FLOSS is a *consumer* movement. It is not a development movement. Developers write FLOSS *because they want to use it*. Especially in the corporate environment, most FLOSS development is a result of wanting to be a user of the software, not of wanting to be a developer of the software.
It is because it is in the best interest of the consumer to join a FLOSS consortium that it is inevitable that FLOSS will continue to thrive.
BUT it is a mistake to ignore the underlying reality of these consortiums. If you refuse to believe that a consortium exists at all (the FLOSS community as it were), you will be in for a world of hurt. We have seen this time and time again. The currency in the FLOSS community is mindshare, not money. So if you try to "compete" against an entrenched player you are very unlikely to experience the economies of scale so eloquently discussed in TFA. Furthermore, if you piss off the "major players" in the community, you are likely to lose the majority of your mindshare.
My personal feeling is that FLOSS has reached critical mass. Only extreme political action (i.e. laws prohibiting it) can stop it now. Every day it is becoming more and more obvious that proprietary software does not provide a competative cost/benefit ratio.
But if you want to succeed in the FLOSS world, you need to understand the culture and be able to play in that way. Those who ignore the culture and community are doomed to failure.
Re:The Corporate Nightmare & Employee Torture (Score:3, Interesting)
In reality, the legal team should just go through the major F/OSS libraries then they would have no need to continually ask people about "what ifs". They could have a checklist of things that the software will be used for and you could probably tell in 15 minutes whether or not that licence is acceptable for that case.
Your description looks a lot like an e-mail I received the other day at work. If you want to include software on/in products list the code, license, use and send it to legal. They review it, approve it, and add it to our license database. The nicest thing is they can give us guidelines in advance listing what we should be able to do with code from a particular license (dynamic linking, static linking, include but without alterations). Companies that aren't leveraging open source code are at a serious disadvantage due to their substandard legal team.
Re:Like Margaret Thatcher's quote really (Score:3, Interesting)
Psychology can help to reveal the true nature of human "utility measures," which might be "rational" (in terms of being rule-based), even if they do not produce the best personal results.
For example, drug addicts have a higher utility measure for their drugs than non-addicts, regardless of the fact that the additional use of drugs may have long-term negative effects. It is a "rational" decision in that not taking a drug may cause an addict great short-term pain. Part of behavioral economics is understanding the relationship between short-term and long-term utility, as well as expectations of rare versus common events, etc.
At the same time, while there are plenty of interesting Behavioral Economic results, there still seems to be plenty of validity to most of the generalizations of classical economics (such as supply/demand curves, etc.)
It is easy to try to bash classical economics on special cases, but its predictive power for large marketplaces remains.
"your" code and society's liberty (Score:3, Interesting)
"my code" - I don't want to do anything with your code, I just want to see what the that software I'm using is doing with my personal data, and if there's spyware I want to remove it, or contribute to an effort to have it removed. This will not affect you or any of the software on your computer.
Society having freedom may interfere with some business models, but propping up 20th century business models is not what the law is there for.
I've partly explained how society's freedom is harmed in the comment I posted above [slashdot.org], but I'll give an example here. Apple and iTunes. It was recently discovered that iTunes contains spyware which sends your personal data to Apple. Users of iTunes have no choice of whether their data is sent, where it is sent to, or what exactly is sent. The reason is that they don't have the freedoms to study, modify, and redistribute the software. You could say "Then don't use the software" - but members of society can't and shouldn't be expected to boycot everything. If there were no law protecting workers, and workplaces were unsafe, you could say "Then don't work". That's not how societies should be made.
Areas such as labour have far more developed philosophical histories and movements. Software and the ubiquity of digital technology and networks are relatively new fields. Developing standards for liberty in these fields will take time. Right now, society has generally low expectations, and society is being exploited.