I spent the last few months trying to take my understanding of Open Source and related issues to the next level. From a general understanding that I had as a computer professional, to a much deeper one, where I could conceivably call myself an open source expert. I am planning a series of posts to summarize some of my thoughts on this issue.
Last week, I was listening to one of my favorite Podcasts – Hanselminutes, where Scott Hanselman interviewed Bjorn Freeman-Benson, the Technical Director of the Eclipse Foundation. The podcast transcript is available here. The fragment here is about 18 minutes into the podcast.
They discuss customer freedom. The fact that Open Source includes the source code fundamentally gives the users / customers greater freedom.
“Bjorn Freeman-Benson: When you bring up the concept of free, there’s free as in it’s no cost to me because it’s such a common idea that everybody has implemented it now. When I went to university, syntax highlighting was a big deal. It’s the sort of thing we studied and now, syntax highlighting, 12-year-olds do that in their spare time.
Then there’s also the concept of free as in free choice and one of the things that Eclipse does, which I think is really remarkable is that it allows you to choose whether you want to pay for something or not pay for something. Let me give you the example of support. There are companies in the Eclipse ecosystem that you can pay them to support Eclipse for you or if you choose not to buy support, you could fix the bugs yourself because all of the source code is available or if you choose not to do that, you could submit bugs through Bugzilla to Eclipse and hope the people on the projects fix them. So, you can choose time waiting for people to fix them, you can choose doing it yourself, or you can choose money where you pay someone to do it. So, you have the opportunity to choose which way that’s going to be and I think that’s one of the real powers of open source is that it gives you that choice to how to spend your time and money. It doesn’t force you into a particular vendor’s model of you have to pay for support or you have to wait two years for the next version or whatever it is.”
This short excerpt addresses the fundamental issues raised by open source. As a user of open source, you have three choices:
- You can choose time to wait for people to fix your problems or implement your features.
- You can choose money where you pay someone (with greater expertise) to do it.
- You can do it yourself.
Arguably, #1 and #2 is present in closed source to some extent. However, the kicker is #3 – you can’t fix bugs of closed-source software.
For Commercial Open Source, this puts the pressure on the vendors to continuously provide value. Because the customers are thus enabled, the Commercial Open Source vendors HAVE to be responsive to the customers much more than closed-source. If a customer isn’t getting their bugs fixed fast enough, they will fix them themselves, but will also not renew a support contract since they are not getting the value. This is one of the fundamental differences between the closed source and open source models. This is also one of the reasons that Open Source companies seem to be more agile and have more releases than closed source counterparts.
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Tags: OpenSource, Podcasts
