Topic: Free software

Free software and open source users/developers are a sort of evangelical bunch. I think a lot of this is because hackers what other people to use the software that they spend their time working on, and of course some of this is because of the ethical systems that pervade the free software movement. And of course we want to both expand the user base of certain pieces of software within the open source world (eg. getting vim users to use emacs) as well as getting people using proprietary systems (like Windows/OS X/Microsoft Office) to use free/open systems (like Linux/BSD/emacs).

The biggest challenge in the second project is usability, and I think both prospective users and developers (and people like me) often wonder “Is open source usable for non-technical users?” This is a question that I don’t have an answer for. On the one hand, yes, GNOME--for instance--is really usable. I don’t think it’s particularly innovative software, nor is it clever in the way that OS X sometimes is, but it is on the whole very functional.

Very often open source, in its entirety, is judged on the basis of its usability, which strikes me as pretty ironic, as I’d wager most open source projects--and without a doubt the most influential ones--are not “user applications.” In terms of importance, the kernels, the programing languages, the libraries, the servers, and the frameworks are way more successful, powerful, and robust than programs like “Open Office,” or “GNOME,” or even--frankly--“Firefox.”

I suspect this is the case because lower level stuff is either to get right, and because hackers end up working with computers on a very low level, so it makes sense that the itches they’re scratching with open source would work on a lower level. And the “cause of free software,” is more directly served by these lower level projects: open source depends on users recognizing the value of hacking on code, which is more likely to be realized in low level projects.

Which makes the project of evangelizing non-technical users more difficult, because the argument isn’t exactly “switch programs to (potentially) better ones,” but rather “become more involved the technology you use,” which is a much different argument. And I think the “usability” question often serves as point of mystification in this much different argument.

My original intent with this post to explore how some of the biggest open source user-applications were in fact sponsored by really big companies (in whole or in part). Novell puts some considerable resources into GNOME and KDE; Sun obviously backs Open Office; Firefox and Mozilla grew out of Netscape/AOL and get a lot of money from Google.

More than anything, I wonder what to make of this. Certainly there is also backing for lower level projects: Sun and Java/mySQL; countless companies and kernel development; 37 Signals and Ruby-on-Rails; and so forth, but it feels more substantial for user applications, somehow.

I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that corporations are attempting to re-mystify technology in open source. I think it’s much more likely that business know that having viable desktop environments will be advantageous to them in the long run, and that since hackers are less likely (on the whole) to work in the user-application space key contributions of corporate-backed developers are more noticeable.

But maybe there’s something else there too. I’m not sure, isn’t the world grand?

Onward and Upward!

So I may have my beef with with the software as freedom,¹ none the less I think we can learn some pretty interesting things about freedom and politics from thinking about what open source means. In this vein recently, I’ve been thinking more about the economics of open source, and as I’m prone to an interest in creative business models that find interesting ways to generate income in unique and special ways. Here’s some thoughts on the “politics/economy of work in open source.”

On some deep level open source software resists the traditional scarcity economic model. There is no property, intellectual or otherwise, that you can exchange for money in a way resembling the normal way. With that option off of the table the open source community has to come up with other ways of doing business, and because scarcity (in another sense) is the mother of creativity, what folks in the open source world do to make a living is pretty interesting.

There are a few of major ways that people in the open source community make money:

1. Software-as-Service: Rather than sell people software, companies sell service agreements. This is nifty, because it lets groups of people get support for open source, it’s cheaper for users than buying software and service contracts, and also it means that service based businesses are smaller, because it’s more efficient to run a smaller company, and because anyone with the right skills can provide the services and not just the copyright holder for the OS. So customers get a more tailored experiences. The con, is that the better software is, the less people need support for it.

2. Custom programing. Basically individual programers consult with users to develop custom solutions around people’s needs, using open source tools. Ideally some of what people write gets contributed back into the repositories (as libraries/tools), and this is particularly suited to very modular/adpatable projects like drupal or debian

3. Certification. A company/programer reviews the components and develops an independent release of an open source product that they’ve certified. The best example of this is the RedHat certified linux versus Fedora Core. Which is mostly useful in the “enterprise world.”

4. Service Software. This is a mashup of other models, and I think it better to lead with examples: Wikimedia/Wikipedia/Wikia and DabbleDB andsmalltalk/seaside. Basically, a company uses an open source product to develop a service which generates income via subscriptions, advertising, and donations, which supports developers who contribute to the core project.

The most interesting effect that all of these models (but most clearly in the first two) have is that money isn’t being exchanged for “a thing,” but rather for work.

Which when you think about it, after we remove a few layers of mystification around “intellectual property,” the only thing that’s truly scarce is labor. Folks in the open source movement have had to realize this, and I think the ripple effect of this could be really profound. More important than even the “open access” to source code.

Twenty years ago (or more) having open source code was really rather important, but even then and more so now, open source code wasn’t a great benefit to most users. The number of linux users who’ve ever looked at the kernel source is probably pretty small. Thus I think it’s not a stretch to say that the ideology of open source (as opposed to free software) is as much about pushing further a different way of thinking about work and “ownership,” as it is about “freedom” or some more specific technological goal.

Thoughts? Reactions?