Book Review- The Success of Open Source
Steven Weber’s “The Success of Open Source” was written from the view of a political scientist and dealt more with the community around open source than the products themselves. Weber examines the history of the open source movement early on in the book giving a good overview and history of some of the major movements in open source. While well written, the history of the open source movement wasn’t the key portion of the book in my mind. He looks in depth at the way the open source community is run and governed, as well as some of the legal and financial issues that it faces as it continues to evolve. I found Weber’s analysis of the current problems open source software faces in a legal and business sense to be fascinating and informative.
I have read multiple books that discuss the open source movement and very few talk about one of the core concepts when it comes to software, licensing. Weber examines licensing and how it impacts the various business models in the open source software movement. At first he examines the core logic of business and their approach in regards to the concept of right to use licenses, “A company typically sells to a customer the right to use software but does not transfer full ownership of the product. This is a key distinction because what is essentially a right-to-use license can and does place restrictions on what the customer may do with the software. “ (Weber, p.191) The right to use license allows a company to control the way the product is distributed and the levels that is distributed at. Businesses can scale the software and offer different pricing schemes, like Microsoft does with much of their products. Their popular Microsoft Office product has had tiered licensing for many years. Along with the ability to control the distribution and use software companies can also tie in secondary pieces to the sale such as support, consulting, installation, and customization. Weber explanation of the concepts behind licensing is usually glossed over often; I think he does an excellent job in breaking down how it works.
Weber then explains that the GPL presents challenges to conventional business logic. Because the source code is released in open source software distribution there is nobody controlling the source code and the power structure begins to switch from the company to the consumer. While this cripples traditional business principles Weber gives examples of successful approaches to the monetization of open source software. In his analysis Weber recognizes that some core business principles remain, specifically the value of the brand, “Brands and trademarks, for example, are not trivial things in complex markets in which the quality of the good or service is hard to measure without substantial investment.” (Weber, p.192) The fact that people are coming together and distributing quality software builds a brand name even if they aren’t getting money for the software. This core business value of the brand name allows these companies to either produce software that is non open source and sell it or it creates the opportunity for other value added opportunities like support, configuration, installation, etc. Even though the software is free it doesn’t mean that the staff your business may have is ready to deploy, run, and maintain the product. Weber talks about the economy of scale and how it plays into the general business model of open source, “It is almost more efficient to outsource the functions to a specialist who achieves economies of scale by performing these tasks for many companies.” (Weber, p.195) The people that are creating it are still experts in the software much like the proprietary software that these other companies create, except that they aren’t forcing the customer’s hand in having to deal with them, which I personally believe creates a better market. When we deal with one company because we HAVE to I feel that it creates bitterness in the customer and usually poor customer service from the company controlling the space. Look at the way people feel about utilities for an example. Weber illustrates these basic holdovers from traditional business well and begins to explain emerging tactics that businesses in the open source community have deployed.
While breaking down some of the different business models that companies have used during the open source movement Weber got into some techniques that I wasn’t very familiar with. One of them was the idea of commercially crippled software. Bitkeeper uses a change long that is openly available to the public in the core of their software. For the open source community they can check Bitkeeper’s website and see how the software is being used and developed. If a company wants to keep these changes out of the public’s hand they can pay for a different version that protects their development changes to the software. “The model is sometimes called commercially crippled software—if you want to use the code for commercial software development, you have to pay for the privilege.” (Weber, p.198) Along with Bitkeeper’s strategy Weber breaks down other companies such as Va Linux, Apple Computers (which was frankly shocking that they did anything with open source), IBM, SUN, and Red Hat who really used a marriage of branding and expertise to build themselves as the source for Linux.
Aside from the business changes that open source has brought on in their industry Weber examines the legal ideas of property and the protection of the product through copyrights and patents. Weber breaks down the some of the grey area in copyrights, the GPL, and patents. I think he handles the difficulties of explaining copyrights pretty well. :
The logic of copyright is linked to the distinction between “expressions” (which copyright protects) and “ideas,” which it does not. This dichotomy is often difficult to apply in practice; it has many complication and subtleties that provide a continuous stream of case law and interpretations marking out the precise boundary. Is the presentation of data in overlapping windows in a computer desktop an idea or an expression? (Weber, p.208)
When it comes to copyrights, while it protects the software on some level the distribution end becomes cloudy for the open source community, that is where the GPL steps in. The GPL helps protect and create the rules for the distribution of open source software using copyright to back their power saying they control the license and thus the distribution. (Since they ask that open source providers technically give them the copyright holding position.) Weber examines how this is all very tenuous, as the GPL has never been fully tested in the courts.
Besides some of the copyright issues, patents are also a potential problem when it comes to the legal issues of open source. Weber talks about a scenario where large corporations take open source patent holders to court. “In a software patent world, large companies have the resources to play in what becomes a strategic game of deterrence and cross-licensing between patent holders…Apart from the several largest open source software companies who could afford to contest patent litigation or buy licenses from patent holders?” (Weber, p. 215) Weber’s examination of this and the faults that patent and copyrighting have is fascinating to me and really was the core section that drew me into the book.
I feel that a lot of complex ideas are tackled in an easily understandable way in “The Success of Open Source”. \ Weber gets into subjects that are usually glossed over or are expected to be common knowledge when talking about the information economy or open source software. He writes an interesting history but more importantly he has an eye to the future and the issues that we are about to run into head on in regards to the open source movement.
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