Certainly, the idea of community is important to understanding the origins, structure, and development of the open source model, and many open source contributors are motivated by rewards that can’t be measured in dollars and cents. But it’s hard at this point to make the case that open source exists in some purified space outside the world of pricing and management.
The great thing about Nick Carr’s post is that you just can’t argue with it. He gets me thinking about the role of community, management, politics, and while I have an opinion about all of these, I can’t put it in context to argue he’s wrong.
Because Nick’s arguments are void of context. And you can’t argue with that.
It reminds me of a conversation I once had with a poor soul who couldn’t tell the difference between open source and Linux. I brought up arguments about the Web, Apache, Bind, Usenet, PHP. None of them mattered. That poor soul didn’t have the mental capacity to separate the concept from the project.
But then I realized, he’s doing it on purpose. Arguing that Linux lacks good video drivers and so open source is doomed was his way of keeping his mind closed and pretending to not miss anything important.
Open Source: Big and Small
Nick doesn’t mention any one project in particular, but reading his conclusions I’m going to jump to mine. He knows open source through OSBC and reading InfoWorld. He knows the open source that has biz dev written all over its SVN logs, the communities created by the imagination of PR departments.
The thing is, open source is not a community. Or a movement. Or disruptive. Open source is code that’s available to the public. Nothing more nothing less.
Some of it has communities. Some of it has business models. It’s the side effect of it all that makes a difference.
If you want to understand open source, you need to stop reading InfoWorld and take a look at SourceForge. Pick a hundred projects at random and see what they’re about. Most are developed by one person writing the code, maybe a few people using it, often not even a thank you note.
That’s contrary to the thesis that open source is a price scheme dictated by product management. But it’s the reality of what open source is for the large part.
It’s Not Just Blockbuster
But then again, if you think of 80/20, it’s very few high profile projects that make a lot of difference. So Nick’s argument would hold water if those few high fliers do make all the difference in the world.
They don’t.
I used a small piece of source code today to write a widget, it took me a couple of hours instead of the day or two it would take to write it from scratch. Or the year, waiting for a vendor to release a “toolkitâ€. Add that several times during the year, multiply by number of developers and projects, and the impact on the software industry is profound.
The Web is flourishing again not because we discovered Apache, PHP and MySQL. We had those for years. Setting up your stack is what you do the first week of the project. Then it’s months of grunt detail work. But those details – the popup calendar, the password hashing, the feed parser – are now easier to find and reuse.
What Nick is talking about sounds like Eclipse, SugarCRM, Mozilla and their ilks. He may have a valid point, but he’s talking about blockbuster projects. He probably never heard of Amazon, NetFlix or eBay. Those little Web outfits discovered that the biggest market is not blockbusters. The biggest market is everything.
And so is open source. You get a big jump from head projects, but what carries you all the way – be it development, or productivity, or entertainment – are the infinite collection of small one. Proprietary has a finite shelf space, but open source can sustain anything. Open source brings the long tail with it, and to understand open source you need to look at the tail. Nick’s missing the biggest part of the pie.
(And yes, I tipped $1 for using long tail to make an argument)
On Evolution and Obscurity
For the sake of argument, let’s just look at languages. I’ll forgive you if you think Ruby, PHP and Python were created in 2005, given the recent rise in interest. They’re been around for a decade or so. In open source you can be obscure for years and eventually rise to the top, when conditions are right.
The proprietary world cannot tolerate obscurity for long. Good ideas that don’t make it quickly, disappear. Not everything deserves a second chance, but judging from the recent interest in dynamic languages, AJAX and REST, some very well do. The downside to the quick judgment of open source is mediocrity.
To think of open source in terms of the projects we know, is to miss the biggest opportunities for change that are just around the corner. From the projects we don’t yet know.
And speaking of mediocrity, if you think open source creates better software that proprietary, you must be smoking something good. On average, proprietary software has higher quality, better consistency and more refined features. On average.
What open source has is variety and tolerance to time. Which brings out the best and the worst. But with enough variety, the numbers start working in its favor. When the sample size gets large enough, the chance of finding alternatives that are better, much better than proprietary, turns from theory to common practice.
Some of these will be funded. Some of these won’t have to.
Stars In The Sky
When Nick is looking at open source, he’s looking at biz devs peddling their wares under a new brand. It reminds me of Pets.com and WebVan, valiant efforts with deep pockets that didn’t make the Web what it is. They didn’t even survive.
But through that looking glass you can clearly see business interests, top-down management, and a recreation of proprietary by any other name.
When I look at open source, I see the Web in software. It’s all over the place, from crappy to spectacular, from headline grabbing to obscure, from deep funded to unfunded, from mega-sites to single pages.
It has the infinite shelf space, no time horizon, and can weather in obscurity for years, allowing the fittest to survive.
The deep pockets are there, and will continue to be there. But they’re nothing more than a few stars in the vastness of the sky.
Found via Tim Bray.