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Has Open-Source sold out?

Posted on 3 Sep 2008 at 12:16

Another thing that distinguishes Red Hat from Oracle is its involvement with the open-source community. "We've been doing this for many years, and we are the biggest single contributor as a company to the Linux kernel," said Knoblich, "so we have an influence on what becomes mainstream. And at Red Hat, we give back 100%: we are pure open source.

"In the end, we are a publicly traded company with an obligation to shareholders: we have to make money. But because we've been able to give back to the community, we're not seen as taking advantage of the community," he added.

Mozilla is another organisation that tries to take care of its community, according to Mitchell Baker, chairman of Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation. Although this doesn't necessarily mean paying its contributors. "We spend a lot of time worrying about what they actually want - do they want to be employees? What would help them keep doing it? A lot of people participate because they want their experience to be a certain way in their local language, and having money appear isn't what they want," she said. "We have a community programme and a grant programme that's very small. Figuring out how to spend money is not so clear."

Although a lot of open-source programming is now done by staff programmers - either working for suppliers, such as IBM, Red Hat and Sun or for large users, such as Google - that's not enough. As Knoblich states: "Just open sourcing [code] doesn't do you any good. It only works if you can create a community that contributes. If you're just writing the code yourself, you haven't changed anything."

Fostering a community can be a problem when taking existing software and making it open source. This is what Sun has been doing over the past few years, by making a commitment to the community and hoping for a response. Although very much a BSD company - thanks to Bill Joy - it chose to go with Stallman's GPL instead of a permissive licence. Phipps said the choice was made, not so much for legal reasons, but on the basis of "which community do we want to join?" As author Glyn Moody claimed: "The GNU GPL does seem to produce healthier projects."

Sun has also "committed to 100% of our core platforms being open source," said Phipps. "Look at any of the companies that claim to love open source: they haven't released any of their core assets. So the question is whether they support open source or whether they're just being nice to it in order to make money from it."

Of course, Sun still has to make money, but Phipps said: "I'm convinced there's no fundamental dichotomy between pursuing liberty and pursuing profit. If there is, I'm in real trouble!"

Turning professional

Pentaho has come up with a "beekeeper" model for how professional open-source software (POSS) companies can work. Basically, there are two separate elements: keeping bees and selling honey. The first involves providing the right environment to keep the bees happy. The second involves doing the usual commercial stuff - bottling, marketing, sales and distribution - in which the bees have no involvement.

Pentaho pushes the analogy, saying: "Bees can fly and so have the opportunity to leave the bee farm if they decide to. So the bee keeper must tend to his bees. The bee keeper has very little control over his bees and has no ability to direct them to do his bidding. Likewise, the community can desert, or even worse, fork an open-source project if they so desire. So the POSS company must keep its community happy. The POSS company cannot rely on the community to follow any directive or schedule it might have. Bees can sting. Community members can publicly object to or criticise the POSS company on its own or other websites."