should one be open and when should one be closed? What are some arguments for/against each approach? What do you think of the quote, “secrecy is the enemy of quality”? What is the “open source doomsday” scenario?
is its economic value as a tool, a produc@vity mul@plier. E.g. it saves you @me. The sale value of a program is its value as a salable commodity. In professional economist-‐speak, sale value is value as a final good, and use value is value as an intermediate good.) Does so&ware have greater use value or sale value?
for by sale value. 2. The sale value of soLware is propor@onal to its development cost (i.e., the cost of the resources required to func@onally replicate it) and to its use value. In other words, people have a strong tendency to assume that soLware has the value characteris@cs of a typical manufactured good. Is this accurate?
or systems analyst will tell you that it makes up the vast majority (more than 75%) of what programmers get paid to do. Accordingly, most programmer-‐hours are spent (and most programmer salaries are paid for) wri@ng or maintaining in-‐house code that has no sale value at all. In other words, so&ware is largely a service industry opera9ng under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry.
of the soLware life cycle efficiently, we require a price structure founded on service contracts, subscrip@ons, and a con9nuing exchange of value between vendor and customer. A bit different than the SaaS of today, where soLware is offered on demand from the cloud. Thus, many proprietary soLware sale prices are only worth paying as claims on other goods: vendor support, or the paper manuals, or a feeling of virtuousness.
by a village of peasants, who graze their caYle there. But grazing degrades the commons, tearing up grass and leaving muddy patches, which re-‐grow their cover only slowly. If there is no agreed-‐upon (and enforced!) policy to allocate grazing rights that prevents overgrazing, all par@es' incen@ves push them to run as many caYle as quickly as possible, trying to extract maximum value before the commons degrades into a sea of mud. What are the possible outcomes?
of mud. 2. For some actor with coercive power to enforce an alloca@on policy on behalf of the village (the communist solu@on). 3. To break up as village members fence off bits they can defend and manage sustainably (the property-‐ rights solu@on).
Indeed, widespread use of open-‐source soLware tends to increase its value, as users fold in their own fixes and features (code patches). In this inverse commons, the grass grows taller when it's grazed upon. But why would I choose to contribute in this environment if I get stuff for free?
need solu@ons on @me. Sit on the patch, or throw it into the pool for free? On the laYer: This choice, apparently altruis@c, is actually op@mally selfish in a game-‐theore@c sense. The real free-‐rider problems in open-‐source soLware are more a func@on of fric@on costs in submibng patches than anything else.
sell the package to others 2. To deny its use to compe@tors When do these points make sense or not? What about in the case of the Doom example given in the essay? How do network effects apply? Also, knowing when to let go of closed source when sensible.
proprietary web server, roll your own, join the Apache group Cisco Case: Risk-‐Spreading Modifica3ons to the standard Unix print-‐spooler soEware, etc. Cisco would have no sale value to lose, and much else to gain. By encouraging the growth of a community of users and co-‐ developers spread across many corpora3ons, Cisco could effec3vely hedge against the loss of the soEware's original developers.
equally; no one in a privileged posi3on Unintended Consequences E.g. legal repercussions Preserving the Culture Removing the right to fork, for instance “The right to fork is like the right to strike, the right to sue, or the right to bear arms—you don't want to have to exercise any of these rights, but it's a signal of serious danger when anyone tries to take them away."
Away the Recipe, Open a Restaurant Accessorizing Free the Future, Sell the Present 2 Specula@ve Free the SoLware, Sell the Brand Free the SoLware, Sell the Content
create or maintain a market posi@on for proprietary soLware that generates a direct revenue stream. In the most common variant, open-‐source client soLware enables sales of server soLware, or subscrip@on/adver@sing revenue associated with a portal site. Adobe Reader, Razors, Subsidized Phones This is what Netscape did.
pressures have forced hardware companies to write and maintain soLware (from device drivers through configura@on tools all the way up to the level of en@re opera@ng systems), but the soLware itself is not a profit center. It's an overhead—oLen a substan@al one.
no downside. What the vendor gains is a drama@cally larger developer pool, more rapid and flexible response to customer needs, and beYer reliability through peer review. It gets ports to other environments for free. It probably also gains increased customer loyalty as its customers' technical staffs put increasing amounts of @me into the code to improve the source as they require. Darwin, Max OS X core
model, one open-‐sources soLware to create a market posi@on not for closed soLware but for services. Red Hat: What they are actually selling is not the soLware but the value added by assembling and tes@ng a running opera@ng system that is warranted to be merchantable and to be plug-‐compa@ble with other opera@ng systems carrying the same brand.
soLware. At the low end, mugs and T-‐shirts; at the high end, professionally-‐edited and produced documenta@on. O'Reilly & Associates Inc., publishers of many excellent reference volumes on open-‐source soLware, is a good example of an accessorizing company. O'Reilly actually hires and supports well-‐known open-‐source hackers as a way of building its reputa@on in its chosen market.
release soLware in binaries and source with a closed license, but one that includes an expira@on date on the closure provisions. For example, you might write a license that permits free redistribu@on, forbids commercial use without fee, and guarantees that the soLware come under GPL terms a year aLer release or if the vendor folds.
technology, retain a test suite or set of compa@bility criteria, then sell users a brand cer@fying that their implementa@on of the technology is compa@ble with all others wearing the brand.
stock-‐@cker subscrip@on service. The value is neither in the client soLware nor the server but in providing objec@vely reliable informa@on. So you open-‐source all the soLware and sell subscrip@ons to the content. As hackers port the client to new plaqorms and enhance it in various ways, your market automa@cally expands.
secret bits is higher than the return from open source, it makes economic sense to be closed-‐source. When the return from open source is higher than the rent from secret bits, it makes sense to go open source. But how exactly does one measure the return from going open source?
Correctness of design and implementa@on cannot readily be verified by means other than independent peer review. • The soLware is cri@cal to the user's control of his/her business. • The soLware establishes or enables a common compu@ng and communica@ons infrastructure. • Key methods (or func@onal equivalents of them) are part of common engineering knowledge.
Resebng the Compe@@on Preven3ng a closed-‐source alterna3ve from geYng trac3on in the marketplace. Growing the Pond Some3mes the smartest way to become a bigger frog is to make the pond grow faster. Red Hat and RPM packaging system. Preven@ng a Choke Hold
proprietary vendor like pubng all your eggs in one basket? Thoughts on this quote? “When your key business processes are executed by opaque blocks of bits that you can't even see inside (let alone modify) you have lost control of your business.”
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