{"id":219,"date":"2006-01-13T01:29:36","date_gmt":"2006-01-13T08:29:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=219"},"modified":"2006-01-13T01:29:36","modified_gmt":"2006-01-13T08:29:36","slug":"the_amorality_o_1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=219","title":{"rendered":"The amorality of open source"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Open source is not a religion. It is not an ideology. It can be used for both good and bad. It does not inhabit the higher moral ground, nor is it a more ethical way to conduct business. It just is, and it will continue to grow and expand.” So writes John Mark Walker in his level-headed article There Is No Open Source Community<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Dismissing the “conventional wisdom” that open-source software represents a movement or a cause or an ideal – the good side in the “struggle to protect users from the malevolent intent of large software companies” – Walker shows that the rise of open source is at heart an economic phenomenon. It’s an inevitable consequence of the dramatic reduction in the costs of software production and distribution resulting from the enormous economies of scale made possible by the internet. And economics will, in turn, determine where open source takes over and where it doesn’t.<\/p>\n

For widely used software, he argues, the internet pushes prices inexorably toward zero, at which point “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.” And because open source development is the most efficient way to produce valuable new features, “open source becomes a necessity in a competitive market.” For more specialized software, where the internet-fed economies of scale are less pronounced, open source won’t take hold: “there is simply no incentive to release open source software in those markets.”<\/p>\n

Walker does a good job of explaining why it’s economic, rather than ideological, forces that are determining the course of the software industry. When any product becomes a commodity, and when the marginal costs of producing it hit zero, then that product is going to become free. For anything other than the most specialized software – software written for, essentially, a single purpose – marginal costs are hitting zero. Once the program exists, there’s no cost for creating and distributing a new copy of it or extending it to a new user. The only question, then, is whether or not a given piece of software is a commodity or whether there continues to be true differentiation (in the eyes of users) among available choices. Users, it’s clear, are deeming more and more types of software to be commodities, and open source continues to expand apace.<\/p>\n

There’s another important economic force at work here that Walker doesn’t mention. It’s the fact that many companies have a vested interest in turning software into a free resource and, cynically or not, can use the “open source community” to further that interest. For these companies – think IBM or Red Hat or Google or even Intel – software is a complement to their core product or service, and as Joel Spolsky points out in his excellent book Joel on Software<\/a>, “demand for a product increases when the price of its complements decreases. In general, a company’s strategic interest is going to be to get the price of their complements as low as possible … Understanding this strategy actually goes a long, long way in explaining why many commercial companies are making big contributions to open source.” By making software free, you can expand demand for your own products – and maybe hurt a competitor to boot.<\/p>\n

So if you’re contributing to an open source initiative to make the world a better place, that’s great – but you probably won’t want to pay too much attention to the underlying economics. You may discover that you’re just a cog in a very big machine that’s shifting dollars from one “malevolent” big company to another.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: Matt Asay provides a good critique<\/a> of Walker’s essay.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Open source is not a religion. It is not an ideology. It can be used for both good and bad. It does not inhabit the higher moral ground, nor is it a more ethical way to conduct business. It just is, and it will continue to grow and expand.” So writes John Mark Walker in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}