Open Source is not about free labor
October 23rd, 2008 | Published in oss | 2 Comments
Tons of people still think opensource software is created by hobbyists (hackers) working for free from home. In Economy to Give Open-Source a good Thumping Andrew Keen argues that the upcoming economic downturn will make programmers think twice about working for free and this might hurt open source.
In my opinion he really doesn’t understand how open source works. To understand Open Source you have to understand the impact of the internet, and you have to understand the origins of Web 2.0. Internet has made worldwide collaboration possible. We’ve seen the effect this has on information and knowledge as is explained in books like The Wisdom of the crowds and The long tail.
The internet enables everybody to collaborate. The internet also enables you to aggregate every little effort. The result may be a big valuable thing.
Another thing you have to understand is that companies do a lot of stuff that isn’t really core business, but still has to be done, otherwise the core business doesn’t get done. So they’re paying for work that doesn’t directly result in something that can be sold.
What the internet does, is that it enables all these companies to work together on things that aren’t core business. And by collaborating they lower their costs, but together they are creating something of value.
A company may for example sell devices. These devices need an operating system, and it’s valuable for the company to make small changes to the operating system, so that their devices are improved. But creating a complete operating system is more costly that modifying an existing operating system.
Or a company may be in the business of selling cpu’s and it wants their customers to take advantage of some new features in these cpu’s. Just by improving an existing operating system a little bit they may achieve this goal.
Or a company may be in the business of selling databases. And by improving an existing operating system they improve the performance of their database.
Why create your own webserver as part of your application server when you can take an existing one, and slightly improve it?
Collaboration on non core efforts allows companies to seriously cut costs. This is made possible by the internet. But this collaboration is only possible if the code is available. That’s why Open Source is saving companies money. Even if they pay for the development of it.
