The Open Source Red Herring

The biggest problem that I have with the open source ecosystem is that it obfuscates its commercial motives behind this banner of altruism. The attempted distinction between commercial vs. open-source, with the implication that open source is somehow not commercial, is a red herring.

Open-source is also commercial. Look at the companies behind Linux - IBM, Google, Oracle, Sun, Novell, Red Hat. Does anyone really believe their support of Linux is altruistic or that they’re motivated by the distribution of “free” software? If profit is not their motive, someone better tell their shareholders!

In the mid-80’s, the Canadian government reduced the patent protection afforded to pharmaceutical companies from 20 years to 10. From this, tremendous wealth was created for the owners of two generic drug manufacturers, Apotex and Novopharm. Were these companies acting out of the interest of the general population or were they parasitic offspring from a flawed premise? Each of these companies chose to remain private, and therefore able to keep their financial records away from public scrutiny, while the “commercial” pharmaceutical companies opened their books to the market, and to criticism. The owners of the generics became billionaires, not because they were running charities, but because they were able to monetize others’ IP and risk capital.

Sure, Big Pharma is profitable, but it is not at the expense of society. Rather, it is frequently to the benefit of society. Look at how the invention of H2 receptor antagonists changed the treatment of ulcers and reflux esophagitis. Twenty five years ago, ulcers often required surgical intervention, but Tagamet changed the rules of the game. Did the profit that SKF made come at the expense of society or did the invention of a disruptive technology (if you were a GI surgeon!) warrant these profits?

Under what terms does Google license Linux? How much does it “give back”? I’m suggesting that it is highly selective as to what it “gives back” to the open source community, and makes these decisions based on its own self-interest, not out of some altruistic motive. Google search algorithms are deeply guarded secrets, and its vaunted server farm architecture is “proprietary”. Is there anything wrong with this? Of course not. Just don’t pretend that you’re somehow better than the “commercial” vendors because you promote open source development opportunistically.

"This is what [Summer of Code] is really about: infecting students with the free software spirit, giving them the opportunity to grow into a community like ours."

There's another more subtle benefit, as DiBona explains. Thanks to the Summer of Code, "Google now knows all the people working on all these software projects, on which it depends," he says. "That's incredibly useful to us. Every once in a while we'll come out with a new API and there'll be some projects in the open source world that might be useful in either using that API or being a customer. You can just call them up and say, 'hey guys, it's Google, we're you're pal,' and let them just check it out." (http://redmondmag.com/features/article.asp?editorialsid=2395)

I have never heard, nor do I ever expect to hear, any allusions from Microsoft that it is anything but a profit-driven, commercial software vendor. As a shareholder, I expect nothing less.That’s my .02!

Martin

Comments

[rog]

Not all "Linuxes" are created equal. The RHEL/SuSEs type distributions are quite different than the Debians or Slackwares of the world. While Ubuntu (another fave of mine) is a close cousin Debian, its thoughts on commercialism is radically different, "thanks" to Mark Shuttleworth. I think Ubuntu's commercial philosophy works, which is why you see hordes of people leaving Debian for Ubuntu.

Google funds all sorts of cool projects, like Google's summer of code, which of course serves their self interest by way of finding coding talent and helping find projects for their google labs. Google is very supportive of side F/OSS gigs, which allows their dev heads to continue working on whatever soureforge-ish projects suits their fancy.

And, yes, as you mentioned, google does NOT share its algorithm secrets, server architecture, and many other details about their operations. In fact, their employees must sign crazy tight NDAs that are unheard of in other companies. So compared to other companies (and depending on your perspective), they are quite "open" or way more "closed" (or "self serving" or "altruistic").

One of the best kept secrets of the open source community is just how little *real* money that Google and other open source companies really donate to worthwhile non-profits. Bill and Melinda Gates, in my opinion, do much more substantial work in this department.

Cheers to them for being (as Ghandi says) the change they wanna see in the world, rather than simply repeating some stupid mantra (e.g. Google's "don't be evil")

[Cindy Reese]

I think that you make an exceptionally credible argument here. It seems that Microsoft, the easy target, can't stay out of court these days. Meanwhile, the Google empire continues to grow under this veil of altruism and social responsibility. I think we'll look back and see this as one of the biggest charades ever perpetuated in a so-called free market economy.

Pretty soon, we will all work for Google. Its the premise of one heck of a science-fiction novel, I reckon.