Are open source programmers fools and suckers?

SOURCE by David M Williams

Monday, 30 November 2009

Analyst and consultant Josh Greenbaum has criticised the European Commission’s view that Oracle should jettison MySQL. Part of his argument is that MySQL can’t die because it is open source – and, Greenbaum says, this means there is no end of suckers willing to maintain it for free. This line of argument isn’t new and the open source software model has long been criticised. Microsoft has previously shrugged off open source software as something which doesn’t provide incentive to software developers to innovate. Greenbaum echoes this when he offers an apology to offended open source professionals by saying he believes their interests are best served by no longer working for free and, effectively, making fat-cat speculative investors rich. In part, open source software isn’t about money. Young Finnish student Linus Torvalds certainly wasn’t thinking “how can I monetise this?” when he posted his now-famous Usenet post that he’d made a rudimentary Linux-like kernel. It’s possible Greenbaum hasn’t heard of a little company known as Red Hat Linux. Red Hat is behind two significant Linux distributions today; Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Anyone can download Fedora for free. RHEL, on the other hand, is available to enterprises for a license fee. By working with major server vendors like Hewlett Packard (HP) and IBM Red Hat has successfully certified its operating system on hardware that big companies want to use. Actually, if you want RHEL you can still get it for free, anyway. Being an open source product the source code is available. The CentOS Linux team take this source code, remove the proprietary Red Hat branding, compile and distribute it in the form of CentOS. Thus, you can still have an enterprise-grade Linux at no cost. Going back further, the Linux kernel is maintained by Linus Torvalds still to this day. So, while Red Hat is making money from selling Linux perhaps it is the type of fat cat Greenbaum is thinking of, exploiting Torvalds? Actually, while I have no knowledge of Torvalds wealth or otherwise, he successfully makes a living out of Linux. He is sponsored by the Linux Foundation so that he can devote himself to the operating system without need to pursue other employment. The Linux Foundation in turn draws its revenue from member companies – of which IBM, Red Hat and HP are members, along with Novell and other big names. Similarly, these large organisations have themselves contributed to the Linux kernel, and take some credit for its continued development and improvement. In fact, 70% of contributions to the Linux kernel have come from companies who are paying developers for this work. In case you think the Linux kernel is a special case, consider too that the most widely-used web server powering the Internet is Apache, itself an open source project and with source code given away. Both Linux and Apache are big business. As is WordPress, SugarCRM and many other well-known and widely-used open source systems. So, are these people chumps? Are they working for free? Can you really make a dime out of open source? Yes. It’s important to make the distinction that “open source” isn’t the same as “anti-commercial.” In fact, because open source is accessible – you can download it and use it at no cost and without functionality restrictions – it has a lower barrier to adoption than any commercial product. Test out SugarCRM, for instance, and if it doesn’t suit your needs you’ve only lost time. By contrast, you will barely find any company that lets you test drive Microsoft CRM without lengthy and costly business analysis and gap analysis and project meetings. Here’s where one of the primary open source business models kicks in. If customers have your product already and are using it chances are they’ll need help or need some extra feature. Consequently, open source companies don’t primarily sell licenses but instead services such as support and custom development. This concept isn’t strange and unusual. Since the dawn of time people have been giving things away in order to sell something else. Telcos offer $0 mobile phone handsets if you sign up on a contract phone plan. Finance companies will give you a television or holiday if you take out your loan with them. In the same manner giving away software for free is actually a smart move. It encourages adoption and consumption, and increasing consumption of a product increases the size of the market for any ancillary or derivative product or service that accompanies the product. If the product is unique enough and good enough it can become the market leader. Apache is the world’s leading web server, despite that Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS) ships for free with Microsoft server products. By being free and very good it’s a mammoth task for any person who thinks they can make a competing commercial web server product. You can’t beat Apache on price so it will take an awful lot of work to beat it on features. Consequently, companies and individuals providing paid Apache support can expect continued work for years to come. The same for Red Hat with Linux support, for IBM and HP for Linux server hardware sales and support, the same for WordPress and SugarCRM with custom themes and addons. Indeed, the real ‘suckers’ could possibly be those who continue purchasing proprietary applications and then pay for continued upgrades and maintenance where those products are inferior to open source equivalents. SOURCE