Open source communities v2.0 (or 1.0.1?)
November 2, 2008
Some researchers believe that OSS is in the midst of a transformation into a new form which incorporates aspects of and participation from the corporate world.
Open source communities v2.0 (or 1.0.1?)
I recently read this recent brief review article about open source software research in my effort to better understand OSS communities:
Boudreau, M. C., Niederman, F., Wynn, D. (2008). “Open source software research: An evolving endeavor.” Journal of Database Management 19 (2): i-iv
The review is the opening essay in an issue of the Journal of Database Management devoted to recent research in open source software processes and communities. The gist of their review is that they say that the portrait of open source software communities as a set of talented programmers who volunteer their services (p. i) is no longer accurate. This model is being replaced by one which a “hybrid business model combining characteristics of corporate distribution (where a company provides complementary services around open source software) and sponsored open source projects (where a company provides the majority of the development resources required to create and maintain its products)” (pp. i-ii). They seem to imply that this is a transformation of the open source movement itself, and that while now we see a spectrum of community models, what we will see is in the future are communities “very much resembling the corporate structures of a Microsoft of Oracle, only working with services rather than code per se” (p. ii).
This transformation of OSS communities should broaden and change research questions about OSS. We should no longer care about whether OSS products can compete in the market place, but instead how are they positioned; we need no longer investigate performance, reliability, maintainability, and security of open source projects vs firm-developed projects, because those questions have been answered (p. ii). Understanding how OSS communities vary, how OSS processes vary and how that affects the roles of OSS products in the market place should become much more important (p. ii).
Critique
My overall feeling from this article is that the authors have not actually read or experienced much about how OSS development is really done, or about the number and nature of current OSS projects. While I don’t dispute that how OSS products play out in the marketplace is an important research area, presenting that argument in such a context does not give it the credence it deserves, and I’m also fairly sure that this has been an active research area for the past several years.
I note immediately that Boudreau et. al.’s model of the ideal open source software community differs from the model that von Krogh and von Hippel (2006) describe, in which open source communities are made up of user-innovators: people who involve themselves in a project because they intend to use the product it creates. Boudroeau et. al. describe OSS projects as made up of “supremely talented” programmers whose motivation is to choose interesting technical projects to work on instead of solving real problems. As I find the von Krogh and von Hippel model more in keeping with my own observations, I am skeptical of the premise of this article.
While indeed there has been substantial interest and investment in open source from the corporate sector — Sun offers and supports the OpenOffice suite, various companies support Linux kernel development directly (Dell, IBM), but by no means does such investment affect more than a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of extant open source software projects. So to say that such hybrid business models indicate a fundamental change in the open source movement is an exaggeration. More likely this indicates an expansion of the open source movement to incorporate a greater range of people, processes, organizations and markets. At any rate, corporate investment and support seems to me to be not a fundamental change to the fundamental open source philosophy.
They say that opens source software products have been “moving up the stack from technical components rarely seen by an end users (such as Web servers and routers) to components that are manipulated by end users and that incorporate business logic (such as enterprise systms and customer resource management systems)” (p. ii). While the authors are almost certainly correct regarding ERP and CRM systems, there been open source software products oriented at end users since the beginning of the open source movement: emacs, for example, and Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird, the Gnome and KDE desktop suites (with the accompanying office productivity tools) , OpenOffice, Gimp, and many others. This again indicates to me that the authors have not paid close attention to how the open source movement actually is in reality.
On p. ii, they contrast firm-based programmers with open source software programmers, asking whether the former could work in an open source software community and whether the latter could work in a setting “responsible for delivering practical solutions to paying clients, rather than selecting the more interesting technical puzzles to work on?” (p. ii). This is a false dichotomy: many corporate programmers are open source programmers. Dell, IBM and Sun are obvious examples, but I know from personal experience that largely OSS programmers have day jobs as IT people in firms (although I have no documented support for this).
