FOSS philosophy

Starting in the early years of the 21'st century, significant amounts of investment capital have gone into open source companies like SpikeSource and SourceLabs. Red Hat bought JBOSS for hundreds of millions of dollars. Oracle bought InnoDB, the core of the open source database MySQL. XenSource made it clear they intend to profit from proprietary add-ons to their virtual operating system software. And in 2007, the president of the Open Source Initiative essentially acknowledged that the term “open source” by itself has been co-opted and is no longer meaningful. .

Several business models have evolved around open source in just a few years, in what seems like a commercial mirror of the innovation that is a characteristic of the technology itself. The variety of these models significantly complicates the easy drawing of ethical dividing lines. As a baseline, there aren’t many open source purists who would deny others the right to make a living providing value-added open source support services.

For the most part, open source advocates have tolerated business oriented efforts believing that the larger pie made it an acceptable price to pay, especially if you believed that the long-term rightness of the cause would eventually prevail in any case, a view that encourages a laissez-faire attitude to this momentous clash of ideas in the marketplace. However, today in 2008, the angst is deeper and more widespread as large swaths of open source mind-share are taken up by commercial initiatives, and the joy of seeing the threat from lawsuits by SCO against Unix evaporate is tempered by apprehension about new partnerships between Microsoft and some Linux companies. If there is a valuable principle at stake here, if open source is a precious gift to the world and future generations, what can or should be done about these developments?

First on the bright side, it is true that the tide is lifting all boats, and the strength, number, and membership of open source organizations has never been greater. Fortunately, many of the movement's visionaries remain with us to continue to guide the way, none more uncompromisingly than the progenitor Richard Stallman. And since belief in open source is essentially a libertarian philosophy, there is little appetite in the general community for legal barriers to curtail the rights of those that wish to see if they can offer value-add to open source and make a business. At the end of the day, open source continues to be one of the most wildly successful growth movements in human history.

The development of the Internet provides a helpful illustration of the benefit of commercial participation. While the network was primarily a resource for researchers through the 1980s, many of the network’s original pioneers, such as TCP/IP co-inventor Vinton Cerf, realized early the benefits and necessity of commercial involvement in order to sustain and grow the success. And although many of us bemoan the hype, advertisements, gambling sites, and related flotsam and jetsam left in the wake of business embrace of the Web, there is little doubt that the progress towards universal access at affordable prices resulting from business building the Internet to global scale is a profound good.