Chris DiBona - Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution

Copyright 2008 Danese Cooper, Chris DiBona, Mark Stone

The software industry has always been caughtbetween two perspectives: one anchored in supply, the other indemand. To the market's supply side (the vendors),commodities and "commoditization"have always been threats. To the demand side (the customers),commodities have always been useful.

The latter view is winning, thanks to open source. Andwe're only beginning to discover how much larger themarket will be, now that it's filling with usefulopen source commodities. These commodities, in most cases, havelittle or no sale value, but are useful for building countless otherbusinesses. The combined revenues of those businesses will far exceedrevenues of companies that make their money selling software.

Use value precedes sale value in every market category. Think aboutit. Agriculture started with gardening. Textiles started with weavingand knitting. Meat packing started with herding. Construction startedwith hut building.

What did the software industry start with? In a word, programming. AsEric S. Raymond said in the first chapter of theoriginal OpenSources , "In the beginning were theRealProgrammers." To Raymond, real programming was bothlegacy and destinya source that began with"guys in polyester shirts, writing in machine andassembler and FORTRAN," and ran through Unixprogramming and the free software movement, to arrive at"Linux development and mainstreaming of theInternet."

That latter phrase captured where the industry was when Open Sources was published in January 1999. TheInternet, Raymond noted, "has even brought hackerculture to the beginnings of mainstream respectability and politicalclout."

A half-decade later, open source has grown far beyond the mainstream.It has become the bedrock over which the mainstream flows. Today itis hard to find a Fortune 500 company with an IT infrastructure thatdoes not depend, in some fundamental way, on open source software.

The Internet mainstreamed programming by putting every programmerzero distance from every other programmer in the world. Supported bythis extreme convenience the demand side began supplying itself in aglobal way. "Real Programmers" wereback in power. This time, however, real programmers were a legion,not a mere handful, and the tools they needed could be found on anyPC, not just on the infrastructure inside large organizations.

Today power comes from everybody who creates anythingthat's useful to anybodyand that any otherprogrammer can improve.

Today there are hundreds of thousands of hackers, perhaps millions.Whatever the number, many more will soon arrive from Asia, SouthAmerica, Africa, and other formerly Net-less places all over theworld.

The technology sector's industrial agethe onein which manufacturers built platforms for silos in which customersand users were trappedwill, in retrospect, appear to be anearly growing stage: a necessary but temporary step toward a healthyand mature marketplace.

Let's give credit where it's due:developing software and hardware in the early days of the computingindustry was like settling Mars. Every company had to build its ownairtight habitat, from the ground up. Making hardware and compatiblesoftware inside your own habitat was hard enough. Trying to becomeinteroperable with anybody else's environment wasnearly unthinkable. Even within large companies like IBM, wholesystems were incompatible with whole other systems. Remember Systems34, 36, and 38, which used twin-ax cabling while IBM mainframes usedco-ax?

All these closed habitats naturally fell in to fighting. The presssupported the battling-vendor view of the marketplace, which became aform of entertainment, dramatized via continuous coverage of thevendor wars.

The Net obviates the need to build closed habitats. Youdon't need to make your own bedrock anymore. Opensource commodities provide all the base infrastructural buildingmaterials you need, and then some.

Naturally, the old supply side felt threatened by that. For a while.

Then the demand side (the programmers) inside those silos began using open source to build solutions to all kindsof problems. Today IBM, Novell, HP, Sunnearly every bigplatform and silo company other than Microsofthave shiftedtheir product strategies to take advantage of abundant open sourcecommodities in the marketplace. They also contribute, in most cases,to the development projects that continue to produce thosecommodities. While the decisions to "go opensource" were made at the tops of those companies, inevery case they also involved ratification of decisions already madeby the companies' own engineers.

You can still build platforms today, of course, but for practicalconsiderations, it only makes sense to build them on top of opensource infrastructure. Amazon and Google are familiar platformbusinesses (one for retailing, the other for advertising), built oncheap or free open source building materials.

The portfolio of open source building materials now runs to 100,000or more products, each the project of a hacker or community ofhackers, each producing goods, the primary purpose of which is to beuseful, not just to sell. Because that software is useful, and mostof it doesn't have a proprietary agenda, wholemarket categories can be opened where once only proprietary platformsand silos grew.

Take the private branchexchange (PBX) telephone business. In the old days, which are nowstarting to end, companies had to choose corporate phone systems fromToshiba, Panasonic, NEC, Nortel, and other manufacturers of closedproprietary platforms and silos. Then a small device maker, Digium,released Asterisk, an open source PBX. In addition to a vigorousdevelopment community, Asterisk attracted countless varieties ofbusinesses made possible by its wide-open use value. In the long run,far more money will surely be made because ofAsterisk than could ever have been made by selling Asteriskoreven by selling the proprietary PBXes that Asterisk now obsoletes.

So, thanks to open source, the software market is finally growing up.It is becoming mature. Its healthy new ecosystem is made possible bycountless commodities, growing more numerous every day.

There is an important difference, however, between open sourcecommodities and those derived from raw materials (like wood or steel)that is harvested or mined. It's a difference thatwill make the new, mature, software marketplace incalculably large.

The difference is this: open source commodities are produced bycreative and resourceful human minds. Not by geology, biology, andbotany. This means there is neither a limit to the number of opensource products, nor a limit to the number of improvements.

Yet every one of those open source projects is concerned mostly withthe improvement of their own products. While they care about howthose products interoperate with other products, theycan't begin to account for all the combinedpossibilities where interoperation is required. That means there isroom for businesses to test, certify, and support combinations of open source products.

That's what attracted me into the vast and growingnew marketplace opened by a growing abundance of open source buildingmaterials. Like many industry veterans, I didn't seethat opportunity until I moved my point of view from the supply sidethat felt threatened to the demand side that felt empowered.