The Risks and Benefits of Open Source
In many respects, the open-source movement has been a fantastic success. However, as we move towards a world where the public cloud dominates, is the current open-source model still fit for purpose or do we need to rethink how free and open software is licensed?
The idea of open-source software goes back decades. In my early mainframe days in the late 1980s, for example, printed magazines like SHARE were used literally to share code for system utilities and tools. I spent many hours either typing these programs into an ISPF editor or taking code fragments as examples to learn how to write in assembler and other languages. The modern equivalent today is to google for examples on Stack Overflow.
Modern open-source development is a collaborative experience that enables developers to work with their peers and create open, freely available software. From an idealistic perspective, the open-source movement has some of the characteristics of a utopian society, where nothing is owned but instead shared between the community. Everyone works for the common good, without the capitalist overtones, very much like the societal model presented in TV shows like Star Trek.
In a world before the development of the public cloud, open source, as a development model, clearly offered substantial benefits. The standard approach has been to share code freely while charging for support or extensions to the open-source base software that provides enterprise-class services. This latter scenario is a more recent model, where only some of the code is offered through an open model, and the remainder is kept proprietary.
The rapid evolution of the public cloud has changed the ground rules for the use of open-source software. The big public cloud platforms have taken open-source solutions and repurposed them as commercial offerings within a service-based framework. Most notably, we’ve seen this happen with MongoDB and ElasticSearch, both of which now have AWS forks of their original open-source code.
AWS hasn’t in any way acted illegally, but perhaps morally against the original intentions of the open-source movement. However, there’s a case to be made that AWS and any other service operator has done nothing wrong at all, legally or morally.
To answer my last point, we must ask – why do start-ups adopt the open-source model? Some will claim an altruistic intention to share and offer their code to the broader community, but in reality, there are some deeper, more commercial drivers.
Writing software can sometimes be a thankless task. There’s only so much code a single human can write in a day. Multiply that out by more bodies, and the time taken to develop something meaningful can be reduced rapidly. That milestone looks even more attractive if investors haven’t been required to pay for all the labour costs. In addition, freely available code is more likely to be downloaded, tested, further shared, and even developed by the users – if it gains a popular following. So, for businesses, open source offers cheap development costs and potentially widespread adoption.
For the programmer, there are benefits too.
