Jason Matusow of Microsoft has an interesting slide in his current deck which corresponds to a conversation I had this morning with Joel West, as well as a few of my recent posts. I've included Jason's slide below (which he has presented at OSBC and a range of other places).
In Jason's presentation, he makes the very interesting (and valid) point that open source is increasingly corporatized. By this I mean I don't mean "commercialized," which has also happened. I mean that open source communities have increasingly been overcome by corporate interests. Using the Linux kernel as an example (see below), it's clear that the community is no longer a mishmash of volunteers writing code they love.
Talk to these developers, and they will sharply dispute what I just said. "Code first, corporation second!" they'll say. And, no doubt, most (if not all) of them mean it. That's not the point.
The point is that the more corporatization, the less free-wheeling freedom. This isn't a bad thing (unless you're RMS), but it does call into question the idyllic open source community in which people persist in believing.
[More at AC/OS.]
For my part, I think the corporatization is a great thing. Novell, Red Hat, IBM, HP, and others have dramatically helped to solidify the Linux kernel into an enterprise-class operating system. IBM's early involvement in Apache no doubt helped to ramp its quality and distribution.
My point is that we shouldn't be naive on where the code comes from (i.e., who is developing it). We also should seriously question the premise that open source offers a novel, effective way to coordinate individual firms. It hasn't. As Joel indicated, Eclipse offers the only credible example of a true "corporate community" project. The rest - JBoss, MySQL, SugarCRM, Alfresco, etc. - are run by individual companies that, theoretically (a la the GPL) make it possible for others to collaborate with them on equal terms, but in reality don't invite such semi-forking.
All of which means we need to rethink what open source actually gives us that closed-source development doesn't. Lots of eyeballs to find bugs? Probably not. Vendor-neutral, code Darwinism (i.e., best code wins, not corporate politics)? Not that one, either.
I think it comes down to greater customer intimacy (again, to quote John Powell of Alfresco), higher trust with customers (they can see the code, if they choose), lower barriers to distribution and adoption, and a different, cheaper way to buy software. Any one of these would justify the rapid rise of open source, in and of itself. Together, they make for a very compelling value proposition.
Posted by Matt Asay on September 30, 2005 12:40 PM
