What Is Open Source About?
Epic blog comment by Tom Lord:
In the 1970s, a lot of people in the “hippie left” (including some effective business people) shared the vague idea that computers are somehow liberating: people who have computers, in this view, and who have all of the tools program and reprogram those machines are somehow more free, more complete human beings. Computers were understood as instruments for expressing creativity, for simplifying work, for learning, and for communication.
Intellectual property law came to be applied more widely to software. This was perceived (especially by Stallman) as a threat to liberating potential of computers. The free software movement formed initially around a tactical attack on the way software was being locked up: namely, the movement’s practical aim was to build a complete substitute for proprietary software systems and ensure that that substitute consisted of freely sharable, freely usable source code.
The free software movement, then, was the one about software and licensing. It was also, believe it or not, about labor:
As I recall, a lot of us working on the GNU software back then shared an assumption: that once the system was complete, there would always be work for systems programmers qualified to work on it, probably on an hourly basis, and mostly paying a little bit better than plumbing. It was well known that Stallman himself did occaisional $100/hr gigs: we imagined that completion of the GNU system would create a large market for such gigs, mostly working for direct end-users of the software.
Open source came about for business reasons:
The source code generated by the free software movement became commercially interesting: Before the GNU system could be completed, some businesses began to notice that the parts built so far had commercial use, largely as components in larger, proprietary software products. A good example: GCC (the compiler) was finished very early in the GNU project. Embedded systems hardware developers had a business need to sell their customers development kits, including a compiler. Compilers are expensive to develop and proprietary compilers are expensive to sub-license for a developer kit… so there is an opportunity there for a service company that supplies GCC to embedded systems companies as a component part for developers kits, redistributable without licensing fees. That’s just one example. There were others.
The problem was that the political aims of the free software movement are anathema to business models that make component-wise use of an incomplete GNU system. If your customer sells or can imagine wanting to sell proprietary software it’s a little bit difficult to say “Oh, this compiler we’re offering you? Yeah, it was written by a bunch of folks who are working hard to make sure that nobody ever has to pay a licensing fee for software. Today a compiler, tomorrow the world. Oh, and, we give them all the code we write and several of them work for us.” It’s a little off message.
Some brainstorming took place and open source was born. Open source was invented as a narrative story for the new class of businesses to tell — an alternative to the free software movement. It was invented to explain the participation of these companies in the world of source code sharing without endorsing — or even mentioning — the free software movement’s political aims or tactical objectives.
“Why is it better,” Raymond’s documents seem to ask, “to develop components for proprietary systems in this no-license-fee, code-sharing zone?” (And he comes up with the now-familiar list: many eyeballs v. bugs, the magic cauldron of free labor, free testing, free end-user focus grouping, etc.) The yarn can be spun lots of different ways.
So, Nick, open source was never about licensing (but was about licensing fees) and was never about software for software’s sake. It was about giving businesses a better story to tell their customers than “We faithfully contribute all our patches back to some guys who are out to smash proprietary software.”
The form that story took was shaped by Raymond’s writing and his famous “fetchmail” experiment. In order to make it appear business-wise rational to share source code with external projects, it was necessary to say how that participation created greater efficiencies. Raymond found that, with a little song and dance, the crowd of people participating in the fetchmail project could be drawn upon as a source of free labor, in several ways. It’s not a good story to say that that free labor came around because he is a good salesman, and so the open source yarn imagines some vague “magic” property of crowds on the internet.
Tim was right. Open source was never about licensing or software (except as petty technical matters). He writes: It was about viral distribution and marketing, network-enabled collaboration, low barriers to cooperation, and the wisdom of crowds. He’s right. Exactly right. Open source has been about exactly that same bullshit, all along.
The What Is Open Source About? by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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