Dreams Work Collaboration Presents…

The OSS Enterprise

I had a dream last night. I know this is really sad [dreaming about Open Source] but I thought it worth documenting anyway.

In my dream, I was working for a large corporate enterprise in some sort of techy role. One afternoon this chap comes into my office and tells me how he has just signed up our company to deploy, globally, a brand new email server system called Exchange. He then harped on about the benefits and what-not of his solution and was obviously very pleased with himself for securing such a large order. Until that is, I mentioned to him that thousands of our desktop users use Linux and his solution would not work. With that information he literally ran, screaming, from my office.

Isn’t it strange how dreams work sometimes? I was so impressed by this one I wrote it down as soon as I woke up so not to forget it. Whilst coming round with a coffee and thinking about the meaning of my dream, I had what, for me at least, was a bit of a brainwave; there is a really simple comparison between OSS and proprietary software…

OSS Proprietary
OSS is created in public for the benefit of anyone/everyone Proprietary software is created in secret for the sole benefit of its owners/shareholders

Simple isn’t it… Does it make sense?

Tags: ,

13 Comments

  • Jack says:

    If proprietary software was built solely for the benefit of the owners/shareholders then why would anybody buy it. If the purchaser gets nothing out of it why would they part with their hard earned cash?

    The converse being, if software delivers as much value as you believe, why should it be given away? Why must the users derive all of the value and the people who work to create the software get none?

  • Alan Lord says:

    Hi Jack,

    “If proprietary software was built solely for the benefit of the owners/shareholders then why would anybody buy it. If the purchaser gets nothing out of it why would they part with their hard earned cash?”

    I quite agree. I really don’t know why people/businesses buy it either! Historically I guess the answer to this is simply that there wasn’t really an alternative.

    “The converse being, if software delivers as much value as you believe, why should it be given away? Why must the users derive all of the value and the people who work to create the software get none?”

    It isn’t necessarily “given away”. There are many OSS projects/businesses that make a healthy profit. And as to your second point – OSS doesn’t really work like that. It isn’t a simple “I buy – you sell” transaction. It is about community, collaborative products created by and for interested consumers. Value isn’t just about money too.

    Open Source is a different way to create stuff. Whether it is software or something else and it isn’t really correct to try and use traditional commercial business processes as an argument.

    I just found the two statements really summed up the differences between OSS and Proprietary rather well. I thought quite a bit using the word “sole” but there really is no other reason for companies such as Microsoft being in existence. They aren’t making software, employing thousands of people for fun or altruistic reasons are they?

  • “I quite agree. I really don’t know why people/businesses buy it either! Historically I guess the answer to this is simply that there wasn’t really an alternative.”

    Come on Alan…you are talking about some of the most tight fisted organisations *buy* proprietary software. They *must* be deriving value from it or they wouldn’t part with their money.

  • Alan Lord says:

    As I said before, historically it was probably because there wasn’t really an alternative… Today, I honestly don’t know. Possibly ignorance, naivety or the fact that a business might be so “locked-in” to one vendor that migrating away becomes more costly than the status quo?

    As a business owner myself, I have yet to find any IT software which my business needs that cannot be found in the Open Source ecosystem. Even if some of the features might be different between open and proprietary solutions, I can not justify paying for an application/service when I “know” there is an Open Source alternative.

  • The point I’m trying to make, not very successfully, is that you stated that “Proprietary software is created in secret for the sole benefit of its owners/shareholders”. That plainly can’t be the case otherwise people wouldn’t buy it.

  • Alan Lord says:

    Well I’m still not sure I agree with you. The ONLY reason proprietary software is created at all is for the business/owner to (attempt at least) make money. If they weren’t going to make a profit or at least get revenue from the product or its use then they would do something else.

  • >The ONLY reason proprietary software is created at all is for the business/owner to (attempt at least) make money.

    That’s a little simplistic. Are you in business with the sole intention to make money? No, thought not and nor am I. So why are proprietary software businesses solely interested in profit? They’re not in the vast majority of cases. Most just want to get by and make a living.

    Even if the proprietary businesses sole motivation was to make money I really don’t see what the problem is with that. Redhat makes plenty of money out of open source…JBoss was bought by Redhat for many millions of dollars (which accrued to the shareholders of JBoss not the community).

    What many “hair shirt” free software people fail to see is that whilst open source is a great way to produce some types of software it isn’t a panacea. There are whole swathes of software that would be unlikely to be produced other than via proprietary software companies.

  • Alan Lord says:

    “That’s a little simplistic. Are you in business with the sole intention to make money? No, thought not and nor am I. So why are proprietary software businesses solely interested in profit? They’re not in the vast majority of cases. Most just want to get by and make a living.”

    Simplistic? Yes.
    Am I in business to make money? Yes. If I thought I wasn’t going to make money doing what we do then I would do something else.
    “…Most just want to get by and make a living”. Try giving that speech at your next shareholders meeting ;-)…

    I do “kind of” understand what you are saying Jack, but I still hold by what I said originally. Proprietary software companies make software in private and their only “real” objective is to increase their bottom line… If they didn’t they would go bust.

  • If you substitute proprietary software company with publicly quoted software company I would tend to agree. Public companies are very focused on the bottom line. Red Hat is just as focused on the bottom line as Microsoft. The open sourceness doesn’t change that one bit.

    I don’t like how software is getting politicised these days. As a programmer aren’t I entitled to create software under whatever license terms best suit my purpose. Sometimes the open source movement feels like a software taliban.

  • Alan Lord says:

    I love the analogy “software taliban”…

    My original post was an attempt to provide a very simple explanation of the different production methods/goals of Open Source and proprietary software. Not how it should be sold or how much it is worth.

    The politicisation of software is something I understand and concur. If you want to write software, keep the source secret, and sell it in whatever way you wish, you are of course free to do so. And it isn’t for me to say that is either right or wrong. I can explain my view of why I think Open Source is good and why people/businesses should try it.

    Politicisation of software has, I feel, come about mainly because:

    Microsoft have become too big/powerful and are threatening freedom of choice (Governments and the EU recognise this). M$ have become a global monopoly and that is not good for anyone. Open Source is [currently] probably the ONLY other player that can offer something different enough and comprehensive enough to compete against M$’s position of dominance. And it happens to be something that they find very hard to fight against because they can’t buy it, sue it or stamp on it in the way they have done with traditional commercial companies.

    Open Source does not have a “marketing machine” in the same way the commercial ventures do and so to compete, it is down to individuals and interested parties to bang the drum as loud as possible. What do you think would have happened at the ISO vote on OOXML last September if the “community” hadn’t ensured that the bribery, committee stuffing and other underhand deeds were made public? I think M$ would have passed the vote at the first hurdle and a very badly written specification would have achieved ISO standardisation. This would have strengthened their monopoly position even further. Which I do not believe is in anyone’s interest.

    That might make a good article actually – the politicisation of software… Hmmmm. Thanks.

    PS: I have no problem with making money – in fact I’m all for it 😉

  • >That might make a good article actually – the politicisation of software… Hmmmm. Thanks.

    You’re welcome…it would make a good article 🙂

  • Alan Lord says:

    If/when I get round to writing it, I will of course give credit for the idea… 😉

    Have a good Christmas.

    Alan

  • Merry Christmas Alan. See you in the new year. I’ve got my 2007 round-up post to do now. 🙂

Leave a Reply to Alan Lord

XHTML: You can use these tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>