There Is an Open Source Community
John Mark Walker has stirred up some debate with his article titled There Is No OS Community in which he argues that the success of open source relies on economics, and not on ideology or ideological activists. I heartily agree with Walker on this point, as does Matt Asay and Nick Carr. But I do have a couple problems with Walker’s economic analysis of the software industry.
First, Walker argues that the open source is better at producing innovation. I disagree, and so does Matt:
But it’s not necessarily the most innovation-inducing way to write software, as John Mark argues. He says:
This continuously evolving collective knowledge base carries another consequence: speed of innovation. Because of the speed with which users, developers, and companies can post documentation, patches, or new software projects, the product life cycle has shortened considerably. Software vendors must work harder than ever to stay ahead of the floating software boats. This constant drive for innovation means that products released just yesterday lose value more quickly than before, due to future products already filling the software pipeline.
I don’t think it’s true that the pace of innovation has increased – instead, I think the visibility into that innovation has improved.
And I certainly don’t believe that product lifecycles have shortened. Those (like Red Hat) who tried to behave otherwise were told clearly by the market that it likes a nice and easy pace, thank you very much. Microsoft and the proprietary vendors could release as early and often as the open source vendors could, but recognized long ago that customers don’t actually want this.
I hate to pile on, since I think Walker is addressing an important topic that needs to be discussed, but I too disagree that open source is better and faster at innovation. Open source has proven itself better at making continuous incremental improvements to software in well-understood spaces. Where the communities are large, such as with Linux, the improvements have been rapid. But open source hasn’t shown itself to be very good at discontinous innovations that jump “S” curves in the way that small software start-ups have. Successful open source communities form around mature software categories (app servers, browsers, office suites), but not around creating brand new software categories.
Walker also gets software industry economics wrong, it seems to me. He is right on target when he says that the internet is important for providing zero-cost software distribution and supporting global collaboration among large numbers of developers. But he gets off track when he argues that the higher supply of programmers today, along with a larger supply of software, means that software vendors can no longer charge for software.
For one thing, software knowledge comes more cheaply than ever. As with any currency or commodity, when there is a seemingly endless supply, the price goes down.
I will focus on two commodities: software knowledge in the form of a programmer and the amount of software available for use. For the first, unless a programmer has a specialized bit of knowledge in an area of high demand, chances are that the ability to command a high salary is less than it was a few years ago. There is a plentiful supply of people who have at least some programming knowledge. Granted, especially talented programmers are always needed and can demand extraordinary compensation. However, focusing on the general case, the price of a programmer commodity has declined over the years, thanks in large part to the internet.
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As for the software itself, there is more of it than ever before, much of it general-use desktop or server software for a PC. Software developers are no longer masters of a black art, and software is no longer black magic. It is an abundant commodity with an expanding breadth and complexity.
[...]What are the implications for software developers? The obvious manifestation of a lower bar to entry coupled with an increasing number of programmers is that it is getting awfully hard for a developer to charge for software. (Quick, tell me the last time you paid for a bare-bones email client.) It used to be that a developer could hack up some small utility, pass it around as shareware, and ask nicely for people to send money. While shareware still exists, the trends are not in its favor. More recently, people who hack together a simple utility simply give it away. They don’t ask for payment, because they recognize that it’s generally a fruitless endeavor. It’s not that they give away the software because they think it’s a nice thing to do; they give it away because it’s the only way anyone will actually notice.
Like any price, wages are determined not only by the amount of supply, but also of demand. While the supply of programmers has gone up, so has the demand. While I haven’t checked recent industry salary surveys, my experience is that programmers make as much as they ever did, at least if they work in the corporate world. I can only assume Walker’s data points are with independent hackers that have seen shareware morph into open source. But that is only one segment of the software industry — even for open source projects, corporate employees provide a large share of the programming talent.
To make his point, John Mark asks a rhetorical question:
Quick, tell me the last time you paid for a bare-bones email client.
Which is exactly the point. There are so many open source email clients out there that no one would pay for a new one, expecially bare-bones. But what about something new, like, I don’t know, an enterprise-class identity integration and provisioning engine?
This gives the lie to Walker’s contention there are only two ways to add value to software to attract users:
With prices approaching zero, software developers have two choices when trying to win over users: (1) add features not available elsewhere, and (2) release the source code. There is no other currency of value that developers can extend to users.
A third option is to develop software that is unique and that fills currently unmet needs of a large part of the market. I.e., innovation, and in particular, discontinuous innovation.
While there is a third option, releasing the source code may still make sense. Open sourcing software is about more than winning over users. It’s about enlisting the support of a community of developers to harden, extend and mature a piece of software more rapidly than could be done with only in-house developers. It’s about getting other open source projects to tie into your software, turning a point solution into a suite. It’s about the supply-side, not just the demand-side of the software equation.
Of course, once it’s open sourced, it’s harder (although not impossible) to charge users for the software. But without the community, the software would never have reached the point where there’s anything to even charge for. So fortunately for all of us, there really is an open source community.