Open Source: Protected Philanthropy

What is OSS?

OSS is a process of software development and use whose source code is based on the protection of intellectual property for the public good. OSS is always licensed: that is, the author’s creation is considered to be a property that is released under conditions stipulated by its owner - the author’s right of control is never relinquished!

There are many kinds of proprietary software including MS Windows (proprietary private interest) and OSS (proprietary public interest). OSS encompasses all the popular public interest licenses such as BSD, GPL, and MPL. The GNU organization likes to say it uses property rights to defeat the restrictions and abuse of property - fighting fire with fire.

There is only one kind of “free” software: public domain. Public domain software carries no copyright protection and represents a gift of public philanthropy. Some aspects of Unix are now in the public domain. The X-Window System is a good example of true public domain software, though it has a somewhat controversial licensing history. Unfortunately public philanthropy is unprotected philanthropy and is subject to abuse. Proprietary public interest software, by contrast, is protected philanthropy.

Three Pillars of OSS

Collaboration, precedent and practice drive OSS.

Collaboration: Open source systems are typically developed by intellectual collaboration loosely based upon the pattern of academic tradition which encourages free and open exchange of ideas and results. Combining theory and practice together with sharing and transparency produces the effect of a “scientific method” of software development.

Precedent: Large open source projects are usually based on earlier successes. For example, the Apache Web server was based upon NCSA code.

Precedent leads to the potentially multiplicative effect of “standing on the shoulders of giants” to build on successful methods and knowledge.

Practice: Practical instantiation of software ideas is the secret *masala* of OSS. Standards by committee almost always fail if not based on working implementations derived from practical collaboration. OSS primarily exists in the practical domain of experimentation and implementation. It is the reason the Internet grew into the success it is: all the standards and protocols of the Internet were invented in the crucible of practice, unlike the more theoretical and unwieldy Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) paradigm.

Trail of Unix

The history of OSS can be told by following the trail of Unix. The chapters might be titled “Unix Invented”, “Unix Spreads”, “Unix Undone”, “Unix Reinvented as OSS”, and “OSS Challenged”. We are still writing this latest chapter under fire.

In its first decade, Unix developed collaboratively but focused on somewhat parochial interests at Bell Labs and other research organizations. In contrast, the Internet has always been collaboratively developed in the public interest and has served as a model to validate the proposition of OSS. The scope of “public” grew from a few defense and university R&D locations to encompass literally the entire planet and beyond.

From 1984, until saved by Linux (1991) and independently resurrected by the BSD’s (1994), Unix entered a dark age in what has become known as the “Unix Wars”. Unix was consumed by commercialization, incompatibility and greed. Throughout this era the GNU project battled to keep the ideals of early Unix alive and to develop and promote software in the public interest.

Today, SCO’s funny law suit is a proxy battle of proprietary private interests (making a buck through property rather than services) against proprietary public interests (deriving benefits through services and sharing). SCO, utterly failing in the new meritocracy, is trying to turn back the clock to what it imagines was the golden age of Unix proprietary stewardship.

Benefits

For the user, OSS promotes competition, control and efficiency. For the vendor, OSS is a basis for increasing services revenues.

Competition: OSS breaks the software monoculture. Munich, with the full support of the German Ministry of IT, chooses OSS for desktops and servers because it guarantees competition. Munich becomes a kind of Culinary Institute where it can select chefs from Redmond or Armonk or even from Munich. And it can swap out cuisines as the palate and wallet require. Competition keeps costs low and quality high.

Control: OSS empowers the freedom to innovate, collaborate, and serve without approval or lock-in by a disinterested party. So Munich is free to develop its own Bavarian cuisine.

Efficiency: OSS circumvents the log jam of the procurement process for large enterprises and government: solutions can be built in-house or externally and be migrated back and forth. OSS is a universal solution that further defeats vendor lock-in as well as reduces internal bureaucracy and paper-work. You can cook at home or be served in a fancy restaurant - it’s the same food: the only difference is the location of service. In addition, OSS can be run easily on legacy hardware so no expensive upgrades are necessary to exploit the latest tools and applications. For solution builders, this also means that one can “build on a PC, deploy on a mainframe”.

Service revenue: The largest sector of IT commerce has always been services and integration. OSS fits naturally into a services business model. The use of proprietary, private interest packages, estimated to be less than 10% of the annual $1.26 trillion worldwide IT spending, concentrates revenue streams toward a few successful vendors. Ready to capture an increasing share of the 90% services segment, large scale OSS solutions providers IBM and HP already report billions in OSS services revenues.

Future

The future of OSS is not shrouded in mystery.

Commoditization will drive availability and services will drive revenue.

The trend for cheap computers everywhere will be mirrored by the continued development of cheap software components. These software components will gravitate to open source while margins shrink for most proprietary cousins. As an industry, services, not property, will continue to completely dominate the costs of software.

Large scale solutions based on services and the integration of OSS components favour vertical and horizontal consolidation to achieve economy of scale and can induce cheaper off-shore development.

Furthermore, large projects require standards, which in turn favour OSS implementations as margins for components drop. It’s just too expensive to make your own Web server or operating system and to try to establish it as a standard. Flexible, powerful OSS solutions will emerge for all infrastructure requirements.

You may even see OSS on your desktop. It is already there on mine!