Open Source and Capitalism

In many ways, the open-source movement is like Socialism--the community working for the benefit of the community without much regard for personal gain.

For the most part, socialism seems works for the software world. There are many companies out there making gobs of money with open-source (mainly GPL and Apache-licensed) products. For example, there’s Red Hat, MySQL, JBoss (now part of Red Hat), Interface21 (with Spring), Iona (with LogicBlaze/FUSE), and so on. Also, there are cottage industries built around these open-source projects, such as the consulting firms, magazines, and online publications, which also generate significant revenue from this movement.

But where would we be without capitalism? For instance, the top-two contributors to the open-source world are Sun and IBM. Sun is by far the largest contributor, when measured in person-months of development time, as outlined by the European Commission in this Business Review article (http://www.businessreviewonline.com/os/archives/2007/01/where_does_open.html).

While the community of developers that join efforts around an open-source project are what really matter, this article sheds light on the fact that today’s largest commercial software vendors have the potential to make an even larger impact. In my opinion this means that there’s room in this industry for both open-source projects, and commercial software entities, and that they can co-exist and benefit one another in the marketplace. After all, communities of volunteers, regardless of the industry or market – software or otherwise – need support from people or corporations that have the funds to make things happen. Any good commercial software company, and open-source project for that matter, will be motivated to do this for one reason: the benefit of the end user. If a corporation isn’t concerned with that, then they probably won’t be in business long anyway.

What are you, and/or the corporation you work for, doing to support your end-users through the open-source software community? Write back and let me know.

Happy coding,
EJB

Posted by Eric Bruno at 09:48 AM  Permalink