Good afternoon, Sports Racers! When you see people making claims about what open source is and who's really doing open source, you know to get on guard, right? E.g.:
[BEA's CEO Alfred] Chuang appeared to rule out open sourcing BEA's Java middleware, saying business customers do not want to hack around with the application server's code. Picking on Sun's OpenSolaris program Chuang said: "Look at those who blindly open source. Solaris - two million lines of code. Useless."
Chuang went on to criticize JBoss. Marc Fleury, JBoss' chief executive, has prided himself on paying a hard core of developers to maintain the application server and keep development alive. Fleury, speaking at JavaOne last week, re-iterated the point: "We've been a big proponent of professional open source and rejected the myth that with peace and love open source falls from the sky," Fleury said. It's a view shared by Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison.
According to Chuang: "JBoss is open source software for selected people who are approved [and] can participate. [Participation is] selected by Marc Fleury. That's not an open source process. An open source process is an open community process. You've got to have an open source process and open source community."
To me, the notion that there's a solid definition of what it means to be open source is anathema to open source. As with Agile, there are guidelines, in my mind, primarily:
You can download the code for free.
You can build and run the code for free, but there can be (commercially deadly) string attached.
You can modify the code for free, and run the results, but there can be (commercially deadly) strings attached.
You can email patches and fixes to the committers who can commit them or skip them.
What's not in that list is "you can commit code to the project," and that's exactly what Chuang and others who get embroiled in OSS briar patches end up talking about all the time.
People either worry that The Midnight Coder will commit illegal or bad code to the project when no one's looking or that actual control of the project rests in the hands of a few elitists who exclude just anyone from committing code.
Those, of course, are issues with all software, closed or not. In fact, they occur more often in closed source software than open source.
The realities with all software development are:
Not everyone will be able to commit, esp. if the people in control don't like you.
When everything is in the clear, The Midnight Coder can't survive.
Open source or not, what matters with software are:
the features
how well those features work
if you, the end-user needs it, that the software will be updated and supported
a reasonable price for the above
As long as you're cool with those parameters, whether something is open source or not is irrelevant to you, the end user. Of course, the next step for OSS nuts like me is to turn from the end-users to the vendors and say, "since they don't care, you should open source it, because it will make your life easier."
Sandals and Rainbows
The catch with that sentiment is that if you're a closed source vendor, and you've been charging too high of fee to copy the software (the cost of a license), then once you open source, it's time to up your support and maintenance fees, but only if that pricing reflects the true value of your software. As you might suspect, there's a high chance that many closed-source vendors are currently charging way too high of a copying fee. Those are the people who should fear open source the most, because re-couping that revenue means having to innovate new software to sell or, more likely, cutting fat.
Loosing revenue you've been unjustifiably getting is tough love: it sucks in the short term, but it benefits everyone in the long term. Copy-based pricing for software is ultimately a distraction from the real value in software that end-users should pay for: the relationship with the software providers.
What can an end-user do with that relationship? They can:
Demand changes in the software, that is, dictate requirements.
Ensure that the software will continue to be developed and not become a mystery box that no one wants to touch for fear of breaking it.
Again, these are all things that you expect in closed source software, the only difference is the pricing: in close sourced, you pay the vendor to make you a copy, in open source, you pay for what you're really getting, a friendly relationship with the vendor*.
And that's the part that isn't all sandals and rainbows: in a commercial, open source world "pricing" is how much you pay for friends. If you can find free friends, hey, you go, girl! But if you can't, don't be shocked when it turns out that "open source" != "free."
More importantly, don't get all caught with people debating who's more open source than who. When you're deciding what software to use (start a relationship with), open source machismo is irrelevant. As we discussed above, being open source or closed source doesn't matter so much as the nature of the relationship you have the software provider and if you're comfortable with how much you're paying for that relationship. At that point, open source is a feature rather than a funky debate topic to freak out about.
*: this line of thought stresses me out when it comes to "small" desktop applications. The thinking works for business and enterprise software, but for apps that I just download and run without ever needing to get support, I wonder...
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