Artagnon's Presence

This article is intended to be a continuation of Modern Thoughts on Open Source. Although this article is totally independent, I’ve used the idea of “open source as an infrastructure” heavily.

Everyone understands how Microsoft makes money, but very few understand why they’re getting a wonderful operating system like Ubuntu free of cost. I’ve tried to explain it here.

The problem with opensource software is simple. The “vegetable vendor” model that most closed-source software uses fails with opensource. Take the most popular and simplest example: RedHat. It essentially creates two operating systems from the same codebase: RHEL and Fedora. They sell support for RHEL to corporates, while giving away Fedora to the community, and sponsoring its development. Make no mistake: RHEL is opensource as well, but it has no community like Fedora does. RedHat decides what to go into RHEL, and they build it themselves. Anyone else is free to build it for themselves ofcourse, but they don’t support those builds [1].

Why bother with Fedora at all? Simple. The first thing a RedHat service engineer does when he gets a complaint from a customer: attempt to replicate the bug on Fedora. If the bug’s fixed in Fedora, fixing it in RHEL is as simple as backporting the changes. If it isn’t, they’ll file a bug in Fedora. Depending on the situation, either they’ll get the bug fixed free-of-cost by the community, or will have to fix it themselves. In other words, they’re just getting code from the community free of cost by maintaining Fedora. Then why not give Fedora to the customers? Because bleeding-edge development takes place on it, and stuff often tends to break and get fixed at a later date [2]: RedHat cannot control what gets committed to Fedora, but they will make sure that only mature features get into RHEL. This service model not only applies to complete distributions, but to individual software packages as well- PostgreSQL, MySQL, Django are just a few examples.

So finally, who writes Fedora? The Fedora Board consists of nine members: five of whom are RedHat employees and four of whom are community members [3]. A lot of mainstream opensource software has a similar distribution of paid/ community developers.

Another famous model is the dual-licensing model followed by MySQL AB (now acquired by Sun). They give away MySQL community edition for free, but their enterprise edition is proprietary [4]. The advantage of having these two editions is similar to the one RedHat gains from having RHEL and Fedora. A similar approach is followed by OpenOffice.org: Their proprietary product that earns them revenue is called StarOffice. Advertising is yet another way: Google pays Mozilla for example.

So, the final question remains: apart from the corporates, who is this “community” that writes the code that end-users get free of cost? Most free software projects started out as “pet projects” with little monetary incentive. The Linux kernel was written by a student as a personal project, and several parts of the GNU operating system was written by Stallman in an attempt to create a free operating system- both were individuals who weren’t concentrating on revenue at that time. Things have changed a LOT since then. While there are still many tiny pet projects that are developed by a few people for little/ no monetary incentive, majority of the contribution to mainstream software such as Linux is from people with monetary incentive. The corporates these people work for benefit either directly or indirectly from that opensource project. Corporates that provide support for these opensource projects, that build their products on top of these opensource products, and those that simply use these products in their everyday work. Simple example: Google finds a bug in Chrome, and finds out that the underlying reason is WebKit. After fixing WebKit, getting that fix merged into upstream will benefit them, because they’re not the only people developing it. Same reason Google will contribute to SSH: They’re using it, and they’re not the only ones developing it.

Even non-monetary incentive doesn’t mean no incentive. Contributing to opensource is a great way to secure one’s future. All the work is out there in the public for everyone to see, and you don’t have to explain the work you did behind the closed doors of a large corporation in flowery language. Code talks. Everything else is CV-noise.

The whole model is sustainable in my opinion. A large corporate uses several bits and pieces of opensource software to create a product. They create an opensource project to drive it, and appoint some developers to head the project. I’ve already discussed how they’ll make money to drive it. Students and other prospective employees start contributing to the project for no monetary incentive, with the intention of rising higher in the project’s hierarchy. They’re essentially making themselves employable by the company- once the company recognizes some brilliant developers, it starts paying them and giving them specific tasks. An additional bonus kicks in when other companies also become interested in the project and start paying more developers to develop it. There’s always some ratio of developers working for monetary benefit to those working their way up.