Gordon Haff - How Open Source Ate Software: Understand the Open Source Movement and So Much More

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/9781484267998 . For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code .

Information wants to be free. Users in control. I have rights to the code I depend on. Thats one way to view free and open source software.

Those are important things. Software freedoms matter. But its a lens that highlights open source as largely a personal movement that was probably never to have a truly widespread impact so long as it remained so constrained.

But open source also has practical applications relating to how software gets developed and used. Its part of an evolution in how individuals and organizations cooperatively innovate. Thats why open source, and open more broadly, is a topic worth serious attention.

Open source software as we know it today arose in a time and place when and where norms that had once prioritized sharing were giving way to a more proprietary and closed computer industry. Open source software helped to change that, and, in so doing, it illuminated processes for creating software that were better and not just preferable for mostly abstract reasons relating to software freedom.

Open source became an integral part of a world transitioning from traditional industrial structures and embedding software into more and more of its fabric.

This second edition provides you with the context to understand the historical forces that shaped open source including the legal framework within which open source operates then and now. While something vaguely like open source software may well have been inevitable, the form it took and the concerns that it tackled grew out of specific events and market dynamics. But many of those events lie far in the past, and the market landscape looks much different. Will open source software start to wither in such a changed world? Or, conversely, can its lessons be applied to broader questions of collaboration and culture that go far beyond computer source code?

In the course of asking questions such as these, I explain how open source works from community, development, and business perspectives through the eyes and words of both practitioners and researchers. I delve into the differences between community projects and commercial products. I share current thinking about project governance and community health. I highlight research that informs our understanding of why developers and others contribute to open source and how contributors can be best encouraged and nurtured. One of the big changes that open source software has seen is a shift from a primary focus on individual user freedoms to one that takes a broader view. What are the best ways of developing software? How can users best access software innovation and flexibly make use of software in the context of their specific business needs? How can they use open source and open sourceinspired processes to adapt to a faster-paced and more digital world?

This book examines the challenges facing open source given that some of the conditions that gave rise to it no longer apply. Business models built on open source software have never been easy, but todays market landscape including, not least of all, the major public cloud providers creates new obstacles to monetization and sustainability. I take a look at some paths to navigate around those obstacles including some of the new licensing approaches that attempt tobut mostly dontaddress business model challenges using that particular tool.

Its perhaps a reflection of the rapid evolution of open source software and open source principles that this second edition has added so much new content. Theres the revisiting of licenses as a business license tool, however mostly ill-directed. On the other hand, weve also seen a newfound recognition that trademarks may be useful as part of a legal toolkit for supporting business models based on open source development. I also delve into open governance and community management practices that have started to be more systematically laid out just within the past few years. The contrast between projects and products has also assumed outsized importance of late, especially in light of the ascendance of DevSecOps, an increasingly hostile threat landscape, and new open sourcebased security tools related to machine learning and trusted execution environments.

Beyond software is more of a mixed bag. Some areas, like open education, havent advanced much with online education, for example, having largely failed to live up to its initial hype. (Remote pandemic learning has only served to illustrate the challenges of distance teaching.) At the same time, in the open hardware area, RISC-V is showing considerable potential as a serious hardware architecture that is truly open.

But beyond software, open source approaches are taking root in data, hardware, education, and organizations more broadly. Not everything is transparent and open, nor can it realistically be. Business models depend on unique capabilities and knowledge. However, open source software both reflects and informs trends and practices that are becoming increasingly important and pervasive in business and elsewhere. Understand how open source came to be and how it works, and youll be closer to understanding how to innovate through working together with others in the modern world.