Bona fide open source

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In the real world, there is often very little difference and many developers use the terms interchangeably, but the definitions matter - which is why the Free Software Foundation has invested so much effort in clarifying the definition of "Free Software".

What is meant by "Open Source" is less clear, although it is apparent that open source has become a successful model for promoting software and an increasing number of parties want a piece of the action - lip service is paid to the concept of "open source" although the reasons why it works are sometimes forgotten.

Software development companies choose to be "open source" because it brings advantages, existing software libraries and tools, economies of scale, reduced costs, collaborative potential and input from independent developers, but most of these advantages are predicated on the trust and good will of the developers.

A company that sees open source as the fast route to quick riches still has to take its developers with it.

The collaborative trick

The popularity of Open Source as a business model is founded on the success of GNU/Linux among the hardware companies, who had their fingers burnt with the fracturing of Unix and "open" standards during the eighties and nineties.

Solaris wasn't like Irix, which wasn't like HPUX, AIX or Tru64, and none of them necessarily played well together... Unix had been touted as the universal operating system, and each of these companies was pouring huge resources into developing proprietary versions of the same operating system at the expense of the hardware, services and userland software that were their core business.

Linux offered something different, a ready made developer community that had formed around the software, and a collaborative philosophy which owed much to the framework of the GPL (GNU General Public Licence).

Not only did the GPL protect free software and keep it free, but it opened the door for a community to form around the software in the knowledge that contributions were fed back into the original body of code.

The contributors owned the copyright to the bits of code they wrote, and willingly contributed their work under a common licence, but nobody owned the Linux kernel. The companies that have generated revenue by selling Linux, Red Hat, Novell, IBM or HP do not own the code.

The open source development model worked to the advantage of the corporate interests that later became central to the push of GNU/Linux into the enterprise, and they pushed their own enterprise features into the code, sharing their investment with rivals in the knowledge that what they gave would come back to them in other ways. Contributing to Linux removed the cost and liability of developing a proprietary alternative from scratch.

Linux replaced proprietary UNIX because the community guaranteed the independence of the code, and Linux guaranteed freedom from the factionalism that had formed around UNIX.

Free and open source software was good for business, the licence and the community worked for everybody, and it made sense to apply the model to other areas of the enterprise.

A sense of belonging

Phipps suggests a checklist of the characteristics that would allow a project or business to describe itself as bona fide open source. These include:

- Is the licence OSI-approved?

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