Open source to Commercial Open Source - Examining the socio-economic constructs of Open Source and its impact.
The paper walks through a brief history of Open source especially from the perspective of Open source software development. It talks about the journey and evolution of Open Source and how it is closely associated with academia and its functioning. It goes on to explore the evolving constructs of society from a closed, top down capitalist one during the Industrial revolution and the imperial age to a more open and democratic one which sees the involvement of the entire community beyond just an individual. Further it draws parallels between these societal constructs and new age builders, innovators and thinkers in terms of how they wish to organise themselves within the Open Source movement. It talks about the relationship, power and economic dynamics that are brought forth by different licenses and models of Open-Source that see involvement by corporates, and the evolution of their relationship with Open source. Further the paper from an all-round understanding of Open-source talks about various models of open-source and digs deeper into their problems. It analyses how the community vs capitalist (almost individualistic) social construct and their interplay especially given the dynamic power structures impacts this model of innovation and building.It spends time analysing commercial open source (COSS) as a model and It goes on to make recommendations in terms of evolving the model of current open source and uses examples from the developmental side of Open Source like SSPL (Server-side-public-license) to bring forth an evolved model of building and community organisation and sharing of knowledge. The paper moves beyond pure software development in its recommendations and summarises what Open-source means to communities beyond developers and delves into product design and learning as focus areas which can adopt this movement. This paper is written from the perspective of a product builder and designer and is meant to address the problems and questions the community wishes to tackle and solve for unhindered innovation and growth.
Keywords- Free software, Open-source, Commercial-open source (COS), Commercial Open source Software, Community, Capitalism, Power, Communism, Socialism, SSPL,GPL
‘Open- source’, as the etymology of the word suggests is an all encompassing ecosystem for any knowledge that is sourced from the open working style of a community. It was coined in 1998 by Christine Peterson to encompass all free software (Software that can be copied, redistributed or modified in other words libre’ software) , freedom ware ( software that can be distributed to the end-user for free) and source ware (source-code that can be distributed and modified). The term was introduced to nullify any confusion the usage of the term ‘free-software’ caused within the developer community, as Christine Peterson quotes when clarifying about the meaning of free-software “We mean free as in freedom, not free as in beer.” **(“How I Coined the Term Open Source” - Slashdot, n.d.) ****
The Open Source movement began with the advent of the internet and has its roots closely tied to the field of software development. It was the academic pursuit of moving knowledge from the hands of few as is the case with propriety software and making it a shared entity that led to the beginning of this movement. Richard Stallman is usually credited with starting the free software movement after he attempted to customise a Xerox Printer in MIT’s AI Lab and was unable to alter the source code (source code is the central code basis which any program works) (Eghbal, N. (2020). Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software. United States: Stripe Matter Incorporated.) , this is when he decided to liberate code from proprietary use and launched the GNU project( a free software operating system). He wanted to create what he calls a New Software-sharing community (Open Source: A Multidisciplinary Approach, n.d.). It was around the same time Microsoft conducted a clandestine study of what ‘free software’ later called ‘Open Source’ meant for their business. At that time many companies were also equally interested in the Free Software/ Open Source movement since they considered Open Source to be a threat to them.
Since the beginning of the emergence of software development Open source and Proprietary software have been like the two ends of a spectrum within a political debate. It is the method of organisation and managerial style by project creators also called authors, licenses and community organisation observed within each of the two ecosystem that lends towards an interesting analogy and observation while comparing them to ways countries are governed (socialist, capitalist or a good mix of both). This observation leads to another emerging cusp that is appearing between the worlds of Open source and Proprietary software called ‘Commercial open source software’ (COSS). Commercial open- source Software or COSS appeared as the mid-ground between OSS (Open Source Software) and Proprietary software. While OSS and more so ‘Free Software’ seems almost communist/ socialist in approach ‘COSS’ doesn’t shy away from commercial gains and monetisation or in other words having a capitalist intent accounted for as well. The licensing of a COSS enables knowledge sharing yet finds itself in the spot of monetary gain being met unlike OSS where sponsorship is the only way to sustain the community.
In this paper as I draw on parallels between how humans have organised themselves as governmental structures and software being built, I also discuss the reason as to why we might be seeing a repetition in pattern of socio-economic organisation within Software development. Further I discuss the problems that plague Open source (like security risks, difficult licensing and lack of continuous updates by community) and Proprietary software ( Intellectual property and hidden knowledge, slower innovation and induced bias) and suggest a solution from the stand-point of combining the best of both worlds. I hypothesise that Open source and especially Commercial open source (COS) is the way to build the future where the best of both can be incorporated. I also go on to support my hypothesis with a small experiment of looking at Open Source project data on the code deployment Platform ‘Github’ and observing the profiles of contributors (Contributors are people who help maintain an Open Source software project) to these projects.
Open-source over the years has moved much beyond software and encompasses learning and knowledge sharing in general. The paper further discusses Open-source from a universal perspective and takes Design as a primary example within that universal ecosystem. The paper is written from the perspective of an Engineer turned founder who has explored the open-source community to build her company and speaks experientially from the perspective of a software product builder, it is also written from the perspective of a UI/UX designer in the making and hence talks about Open-source beyond code specifically from the point of view of a designer. The literature of this paper doesn’t intend to address or provide a take on the debate of Open source being Good or Bad, where extensive literature has already been written and can be found (The Janus Face of Commercial Open Source Software Communities : An Investigation Into Institutional (Non)Work by Interacting Institutional Actors, n.d.). It uses the literature written about this domain as a starting point to introduce Commercial Open-Source and make recommendations for better adoption within the community of Developer and Designers across organisations and also suggests an evolved licensing for this model . This paper already considers Open-source as a viable method of building and aims to add in the direction of bettering this ecosystem and the community.
In 1950’s computer Science was still an emerging discipline. As is the the case with any emerging field the initial progress is dependent on academia, the collaboration with the members inhabiting these institutions and in general the sharing of knowledge. It was during this time that sharing of knowledge amongst institutions to progress the research was a common practice. It was during the 1960’s when the concept of Open-source development gave a glimpse of its potential with the invention of the internet. The internet , which started as a defence project became the project responsible for bringing in the concept of global collaboration among Universities to build a sort of Global Memex. It was initially a network with Universities as its nodal points and created a place for knowledge sharing between these institutes or nodes (A Brief History of the Internet__Leiner-et-al.Pdf, n.d.). With the internet being the open network it is , there was a lot of research and innovation that took place during that period. Within this period also came the software companies which took a piece of technology and used the confidentiality of knowledge to capitalise on Profits. Hence began the tug of war between the two schools of thought. It was around the 1960’s and 70’s that a lot of work was happening within the walls of Institutions like MIT, SRI (Stanford Research Institute),IBM and Xerox PARC labs etc. Not only were universities sharing academic research which included code but institutes like IBM and others sold their first large-scale commercial computers with free software. "Free" meant that the source code was free and available and, therefore, the software could be improved and modified. ‘Free’ here was to do with freedom to innovate and build up on discovered knowledge. Which also meant in the case of IBM that hardware was the product being sold, not software (Open Source: A Multidisciplinary Approach, n.d.).
As the 70’s dawned the trend of ‘Free’ was slowly being surpassed by ‘Proprietary’. By the 80’s companies stopped working with developers in the ’Open Source Community’ and used the software built by these developers under garb of IP and Proprietary licenses to profit their businesses (The Janus Face of Commercial Open Source Software Communities : An Investigation Into Institutional (Non)Work by Interacting Institutional Actors, n.d.). It was around this time Richard Stallman triggered by the inaccessibility to the source code of a broken printer at MIT decided to work solely for the purpose of sharing software and knowledge associated with it and started working on GNU, a free operating system. Later another pioneer, Linus Torvalds latched onto the thoughts of Richard Stallman and the Linux Operating System was born.
‘Free Software’ had caught the attention of many institutes as they feared that it would take over their profitability. Microsoft was one of them. Microsoft conducted an initially held confidential study on Open-Source. These documents when later released were given the sobriquet ‘Halloween Documents’ by the Open source community. This is what the documents entailed