The art of taking an existing product and modifying it in ways never intended by the original manufacturer has been a core tenet of the open source and free culture movements from the beginning. It is long past time for more sanity when considering these issues and crafting public policy.
Has the terminology finally evolved in the debate over “who’s open source?” It would seem so. After years of haggling over the essence of open source, free software or other monikers, Simon Phipps gets right to the point in “A Remarkable Reversal” – his critique of Richard Stallman’s joint letter to the EC regarding Oracle and MySQL.For the first time, there seems to be a growing concensus that an OSI-compliant license alone is not enough to define one’s position on the openness spectrum.
in reference to: Open Source: More than a License (view on Google Sidewiki)
It did not compute, that funny, colorful building in marked contrast to the rest of the landscape. “What’s a mosque?” I asked. I don’t recall exactly how my father answered, but the lasting memories of that day tell me that not only did I understand that it was visually different, but that it somehow clashed philosophically with everything I had learned until then. At that time, my father was a Southern Baptist minister, and the world was clearly divided into two groups: born-again Christians and then everyone else, with everyone else consisting of witches and devil worshipers. In our world, not only were they non-Christians, but they were actually “against God” and, by extension, against Christians.
That was the first time I was ever confronted with the Other, ie. those against our values. I remember quite clearly thinking “Why are they here?” As in, why don’t they go back to their own people and country – some place where they wouldn’t torment those of us perfectly content to live in the world we had spent so many generations constructing.
Since then, I’ve had many opportunities to confront the Other and to get to know the Other. I’ve read much in the news about tea parties, birthers, town hall crashers, and many more who have been described at various turns as racists, crazies, wingnuts, and lobotomized dittoheads. Except for a few fringe groups who do meet those criteria, the sum of the rest of those who sympathize with these fringe elements are afraid of the Other. In their lifetimes they have witnessed demographic shifts that have brought the Other “intruding” into their daily lives. And in Barack Hussein Obama, they see a living manifestation of “The Other.”
Hell, he’s so Other, he’s the Other’s other: born in Hawaii, lived in Indonesia, and had a Muslim stepfather. This otherness drives the fringe stark-raving mad. This man, who so clearly is out of step with our vision of America, how dare he inhabit our throne? You can hear them ask, “Why is he here?”
In the world of open source, there’s a narrative that has predominated since the time that the term open source was coined – that being the need for the underlying platform to be open source. We can tolerate proprietary software on an open platform, such as Linux, much more than we tolerate free software on a closed platform, like Windows.
For all of open source’s self-professed pragmatism, there is a noticeable gap between how Linux users are supported and how Windows users are supported. If we are truly as pragmatic as we like to think, perhaps the time has come to close that gap.
Link to full post on OStatic.com
Reading Sam Dean’s piece on the absence of linux marketing brought back memories, many of them painful, of my involvement in Linux International, back in the day. For you kids today who only know your Linux Foundation, Linux International (LI) was founded by Jon ‘maddog’ Hall as a vendor-driven organization to, among other things, protect the Linux trademark. One of LI’s initiatives that began in early 2000 was a marketing plan to be jointly funded by the vendors. You can read my call to action from that time begging and pleading for the members of LI to band together to do *something*.
Then, as now, the problem was the cacaphony of noise from various vendors, each with their own spin on Linux. Was it a desktop thing as Eazel and Ximian proclaimed at the time? Was it an enterprise dark horse as backed by IBM? Was it a really great web server, as VA Linux and Red Hat were promoting? All of the above? While multiple Linux markets have continued to grow since then, there does not appear to be a solution to the general problem.
Many of the responses to my previous blog post “Open Core or Open Snore?” were in agreement, and some were not. As is often the case, the more interesting ones expressed disagreement. Some took issue with my post by pointing out open core companies that might be termed success stories: SugarCRM, Alfresco, Mindtouch. But then, I never wrote that open core cannot be successful, but rather that any success will be limited by nature of the model. Open core effectively places a cap on community development turning open source efforts into a viral marketing play, when it can be so much more.
One critique that did resonate was how much open source dev models actually impacted the bottom line. A company’s success is impacted by a myriad of factors, including open source strategy and tactics.Seeing as how some companies will succeed with practically no open source development at all, it’s only natural to concede that an open core approach will succed in some markets. However, if I were creating an open source community strategy in a crowded, competitive market, I sure wouldn’t want to place an artificial handicap on my community development practices. I’ll use 2 case studies to illustrate my point: Red Hat / Fedora and CollabNet / Subversion
If you had asked me in 1999 if we would still be having discussions on the viability of Open Source business models in 2009, I would have looked at you incredulously. It seems like we’re taking an awfully long time to learn the lessons of what works and what doesn’t. Take, for example, the recent discussions around Open Core (see Andrew Lampitt’s original post). I have to concur with Tarus Balog at OpenNMS when he says it’s fauxpen source.
What we should be asking ourselves is not what the VC’s want nor what makes us ideologically pure, but rather ‘what’s best for our respective communities?’ If communities are indeed the lifeblood of Open Source projects, doesn’t it make sound business sense to maximize community success?
