Companies and Open Source

Open Source is unavoidable. It managed to force its way into our daily world, to a level Free Software never achieved, even if it did so by surfing on the ambiguities of the words' definitions, or lacks thereof (as Richard Stallman rightly points).

Companies jump in the bandwagon mostly for two kinds of reasons:

• because it is there, a replacement for standards, or just one more kind of de facto standards (sometimes called industrial standards). This is a pure consumption of Open Source, fuelled by the (naive) expectation of low costs (naive because the acquisition cost is always a tiny part of the costs involved in software, but accounting is often cynically shallow-minded).
• because of the dynamic of cost-free products, and the competition in this domain to capt communities of consumers, and to give rise to markets around those.

Both motivations are completely remote to either freedom or openness. But is this a matter of cynicism or of naivety?

What pay-back should one expect from Open Source?

From an individual developer's perspective, the advantage of Open Source is that it removes the burden of a dependency. If a product doesn't work in a satisfying way, you can fix it, instead of just reporting the problem to a generic and clueless customer support, and praying for a 'solution' in a forthcoming release. Of course, the blessing soon becomes a curse if you cannot publish your fix, so that you remain with an incompatible version, and the new burden of having to maintain it yourself alone over every new release.

What we see here, is that an Open Source community is far from being anything close to a consumers community. It is first and foremost a producers community, an essential quality of which is the manageability of the horizontal communications within it.

Let's make it concrete: if you are not a committer, you don't care for the alleged difference beetwen subversion and ClearCase, on the basis of one being 'Open Source' and the other 'proprietary'. Both products users mailing lists are just about as low quality and frustrating, as needed to make my point. Being tagged as poisonous is not better than being just a customer. Isn't it what the subversion authors in the video quoted here above, notice themselves (naively) in their conclusion: this applies to all communities? (subversion is nothing new—Open Source is new—therefore subversion is not Open Source—QED)

Now back to our main topic: who then should profit from (real) Open Source (aka Free Software: source being open for write, in order to free yourself)?
Answer: those who write software. Who is that?
Answer: mostly professional programmers, working for software companies.

One cannot consume Open Source. In order to benefit from it, one must contribute to it. This is where the pay-back is. But in order to make the return on investment faster, one needs SCM.
This should be a concern of companies seriously considering to host a community.

-- MarcGirod - 07 Oct 2007