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State of the nation

Posted on 28 Jan 2009 at 15:59

Simon Brock looks at the future of open-source software in light of the economic downturn, but warns that not all free solutions are best.

Does this TCO-based line of argument I've used for our mail system apply to our other applications? Again, the answer is "No!", but you do need to understand what we're talking about when it comes to open-source software. By saying open source we're referring to three different types of development model.

The first category includes those projects where it really doesn't matter very much that they're open source. This is a strong statement, and when I give you an example it's going to provoke howls of derision, but please bear with me. An example of this category is... Firefox. The reason I say it doesn't matter whether Firefox is open source is that most of its users don't care. They are typically replacing one free application, either Internet Explorer or Safari, with another free application, and the development model that lies behind it is of no concern to them beyond that. The advantages they gain from using Firefox arise because it's a better browser than the other two (for example, all those useful plug-ins you can get). And never forget that Firefox became what it is because a closed-source web browser got opened up to start the ball rolling.

The second category is commercial open-source software - that ever-increasing collection of applications where the source code for the system is open, but is wholly or mostly maintained by a commercial company. The best-known example of this is MySQL, which is owned by Sun. You can download the source and compile your own version, and people make changes to it - for example, there's a set of patches from Google that tailor it better to Google's interfaces - but it really is a Sun product.

The third category of open-source software is what we might call "real open source", where a community of like-minded developers have come together, created an application and then maintained and enhanced that application collectively with the source code free to all. Some of this community open source has become formalised, and a number of the most important applications are managed by foundations that are semi-commercial. For example, the Apache web daemon (along with many other applications including SpamAssassin) are managed by the Apache Foundation. Apps such as Eclipse and even the Linux kernel have a very similar status. There are still a lot of very good applications that are genuine community applications in this sense.

How do you use open source?

I can see at least one problem with the above categorisation of open source: my first category is about how people use open source, while the second and third categories are both about how open-source is produced. I stand by my claim, though, that most users of open-source software neither know nor care that it's open source - the Firefox example extends to many, many other applications. My iPhone contains open-source software and if I had a Google Android phone its whole operating system would be open source, but in neither case does this fact make any difference to me. The cost of Firefox, my iPhone or an Android phone for that matter, doesn't seem to be affected by their open-source heritage. Similarly, users of OpenOffice, Thunderbird and the like don't care because the equivalent closed-source products are equally cheap. The important point about all these examples is that they're in effect black boxes and no-one looks inside to see how they work.

But there are open-source boxes that aren't so black, where it does make a difference that they're open-source because it does affect their cost. People put versions of Linux on their servers because it's cheaper to install than Windows, and similar arguments hold for MySQL, PostgreSQL and many other server products. There are also open-source enabling products, including all the programming languages such as PHP, Perl, Ruby and the rest. And an increasing number of business products (the topic I was originally going to write about this month, and will get to in a minute) fall into this category, too.