§ January 11th, 2007 § Filed under Open Source Comments Off
Some more thoughts on the open source pure-play vs. mixed source business models.
I’ve lived through several business and IT fads. I came of age as a consultant as an information engineering and computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tool expert. Never heard of CASE tools? Exactly! It was a software development methodology and technology that was going to radically change the economics of software. Somehow the economics of software escaped unscathed.
Then I morphed into a business process reengineering consultant, applying the business modeling I had mastered through CASE tools. BPR was going to radically change the way businesses were run by challenging all of the old assumptions and creating a new way of getting work done. Didn’t quite fulfill its promise.
Eventually I was riding the next wave — eBusiness — which was going to radically change the economy itself, outlawing the business cycle and defying the conventional fixation on profits. Ouch.
Now each of these trends, I believe, made lasting contributions to business competitiveness and the evolution of information technology. The world is a better place because of each of them, and many of the underlying principles of these trends have been made a part of the standard way that business and IT are done today. But they didn’t overthrow the old regime, they were co-opted and absorbed by the old regime. Evolution, not revolution.
So what about open source? I approach open source with my eyes, and my mind, open. It has lots of radically new characteristics that I find very attractive for economic reasons. I have become a big proponent of open source. However, given my past experiences, I’m just not ready to “burn the boats” quite yet.
For this I may be accused of “not getting” open source. But I remember the same words coming out of my mouth many times about those that “didn’t get” CASE, BPR, or eBusiness. I think “not getting it” is a short-hand way to avoid sober reflection of the most aggressive claims of the new orthodoxy.
So it seems very likely to me that open source won’t overthrow the old order, but will be adopted, adapted and assimilated by the old order. I see open source becoming ubiquitous, but not to the exclusion of proprietary software. The track record of innovative business practices and business models tells me that revolutions are predicted far more often than they actually occur.
But I’ve been wrong before.
I finally got around to seeing what some of the FSF folks have been saying, in particular, this speech by Eben Moglen and this speech by Richard Stallman. Whoa, dude, you gotta see this to believe it.
It’s not just that they are wrong, although they are both spectacularly, brilliantly wrong, but it’s how they are wrong. They are wrong in a way that is ideologically compelling and very attractive. They describe the world the way it should be: software is king, software can’t be owned, software is developed by and for the masses without thought nor care for income, capital or economic scarcity.
The problem, of course, is that the world isn’t the way it should be, it’s the way it is. (Matt Asay made this point perfectly, which I find a bit ironic, given his view towards the FSF and open source purity.) Which presents two problems with Moglen’s and Stallman’s views.
First, I wonder how many open source hackers really buy into the whole FSF dogma? Linus Torvalds certainly doesn’t seem to, given his objections to GPLv3. I think for most open source contributors, it’s a much simpler motivation — to participate in building a piece of software that is great, that becomes ubiquitous, that gets adopted worldwide, that knocks all the competition (especially proprietary competition) out of the water, that takes over the world. In other words, it’s about the software, not the socio-political movement to end ownership of software. It seems to me that the glee many hackers take in knocking out proprietary competition (let’s be honest…we’re talking about Microsoft here) is the delight in seeing David kick Goliath’s ass. Every Disney movie ever made about sports has the scrappy underdog beating the arrogant front-runner, and for good reason: we all enjoy this narrative. But it’s a big step from this ambition and competitiveness to an ideological fervor to over-turn the global economic tables of the software industry. After all, these days most open source competitors work for software companies.
This isn’t to say that our copyright and patent regimes aren’t totally botched and in need of radical reform. Of course they are. But reform doesn’t necessarily mean the abolition of IP protections altogether.
But even if all hackers everywhere buy into the FSF ideology completely, there is still a second problem, one which directly relates to my employer’s recent deal with Microsoft. The FSF expects Novell to act as if it buys into the Stallman political agenda 100%, even though it is not reflected in the laws of the land, and even though Novell’s shareholders could care less. Novell is being held to a standard of ideological purity that its owners (and most of its employees) don’t agree with. All these arguments about the “spirit” vs. the “letter” of the GPL revolve, it seems to me, around enforcing a social and political agenda instead of a legal and commercial agreement.
But what about Red Hat, you say? They have adhered much more closely to FSF ideological purity, and their shareholders are delighted! Which makes my point — Red Hat’s strategy is a business strategy, not a political or socio-economic decision. If the day comes that it is in Red Hat’s shareholders interests for Red Hat to split with the FSF, I’m sure they will. Their open source pure-play is very successful as a business model independent of the FSF political agenda.
Red Hat’s success as a pure-play doesn’t preclude the viability of alternative business models, namely Novell’s mixed source business model. Of course, time will tell, and the jury is certainly out on Novell’s approach. But the reason I am content to continue as an employee of Novell is that a mixed source model seems a very viable alternative from a business perspective. And because I don’t, for a second, buy into the FSF ideology.
I have installed a plug-in for WordPress that enables commenters (and bloggers) to log in using an OpenID url. I’m using mylid.net as my identity provider, although of course there are plenty to choose from, and the blog should handle any provider seamlessly.
The plug-in seems to work pretty well as-is. Let me know if you run into any authentication or user interface issues.