Open Source has always fas­ci­nated me. On the one hand it make so much sense; on the other hand it requires imag­in­ing a con­ver­sa­tion between Karl Mark and John Doerr. Up until recently at least the eco­nomic model was understandable:

  • Open Source offered free func­tion­al­ity for indi­vid­u­als or stu­dents who couldn’t afford it oth­er­wise (espe­cially in a mod­i­fi­able or exten­si­ble form).
  • It was also free to the largest users (like Ama­zon using Xen), since they had to sup­port it them­selves anyway.
  • There was a busi­ness to be made sup­port­ing the users in mid­dle who were too small to sup­port it them­selves but too depen­dent on cor­rect oper­a­tion to respon­si­bly go with­out support.
  • It was also pos­si­ble to add your own pro­pri­etary and sep­a­rate mod­ules, and sell them as sep­a­rately licensed soft­ware (the rules say that improve­ments to the base soft­ware have to be con­tributed back to the community).

 A recent encounter with old friend Chris Keene (most recently CEO of Wave­Maker, now a strate­gist at acquirer VMware) added new facets to fhis prob­lem (see his ear­lier post).

  • There is a loop­hole in the basic GPL license that says that if you use Open Source to deliver a ser­vice, but you don’t sell or dis­trib­ute the soft­ware, you don’t have to con­tribute your changes back to the community.
  • When Open Source func­tion­al­ity is deliv­ered as part of a Cloud ser­vice (rather than as soft­ware), the sup­port propo­si­tion van­ishes — you get reli­able use in the form of a ser­vice but you don’t have to main­tain it your­self. So as more use moves to the Cloud, and is deliv­ered as a ser­vice, the estab­lished Open Source econ­omy crumbles.

Ah, but things get stranger still if you think that Open­Stack and Hor­ton­works are lead­ing indi­ca­tors. Before Open­Stack, NASA was using Euca­lyp­tus which con­sisted of the Open Source bits and the pro­pri­etary bits. NASA wanted the pro­pri­etary func­tion­al­ity as part of the Open Source base and when that nego­ti­a­tion failed they part­nered with Rack­Space and just did it them­selves. Hor­ton­works is tak­ing the same approach: they think the man­age­ment func­tions that Cloud­era adds to Hadoop are valu­able base func­tions so they are going to add that func­tion­al­ity right into base dis­tri­b­u­tion and then give it back for free to the community.

So the big play­ers, using Open Source, have spe­cial priv­iledges (not required to con­tribute addi­tions back to the com­mu­nity) and can also destroy the part of the Open Source busi­ness model that lever­ages pro­pri­etary addi­tional software.

Hmmm… Sounds to me like Karl Marx (or maybe Stalin) 1, John Doerr 0, at the end of this inning.