The End Of Open Source Affirmative Action

Some of the largest companies in the open source world have been moving away from the term open source as a primary differentiator in their marketing material. So says Matthew Aslett over on the 451 Group’s 451 CHAOS Theory Blog. Before we go any further I think it is fair to point out that Matthew made this admittedly “unscientific observation” while he was “examining the trend of open source-related vendors disengaging from open source development and licensing as part of my research”. So clearly Matthew’s view is that there is a trend of open source related vendors disengaging from open source development and licensing. In that case what Matthew says in his article may be a case of “when you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail”, so should be taken with a grain of salt.

But I think Matt is actually on to something. I think open source companies are no longer content to be “the best open source solution” in a given market. They have grown past that. They now aim to be the best solution in a given market, period!

That is a good thing.  I think of it as the end of open source affirmative action.  Much the same way after Jackie Robinson paved the way for African-Americans in baseball and Tony Dungy became the first African-American to coach a Super Bowl winner, we are moving past the time when an open source company being a best of breed is a novelty.  We don’t have to tag a company with being the first open source company to do this or that, being the first one to earn a certain amount of money or anything else for that matter. We are coming to a time that while we may still count women and Hispanics on the Supreme Court, we don’t care if a great BI or CMS solution is open source or not. Solutions will be judged on their merits and being open source is a feather in the cap perhaps, but not a reason for being in and of itself.

I think this will force commercial open source vendors to try harder and make better products. For too long I think we have given open source products the benefit of the doubt. If it was too hard to install or the GUI wasn’t quite there, we could overlookit  and say it is open source, you have to expect that. If the company behind the open source was not providing great support and service, was not developing the codebase, we could overlook it and say it is to be expected, after all it is open source. 

Open source solutions have proven they are scalable and secure (or at least as secure as closed source solutions). We have seen them scale the ivory towers of the enterprise and succeed. They are every bit as good as the closed source products out there.

So being open source is no longer in and of itself good enough. It is not a reason to be cut some slack. It is not a reason to get a pass on anything. If an open source solution is going to thrive it will do so because it deserves to, because it is as good or better as anything else out there. Open source affirmative action is at an end and all software will be judged on its own merits.

This is not a pass for open source companies to abandon their communities though. The successful open source companies are successful because they have thriving communities that they have tendered and fed well. To abandon them would be a fatal mistake.

For most open source companies the “community editions” and communities still provide the wide base and farm system which allows the commercial open source code to accelerate past its competition. Any open source company that fantasizes that moving away from open source would somehow be better for them is probably except in the most corner of corner cases making a huge error.

I think though that companies that have been successful with an open source business model already realize the value of the community and of being an open source modeled company. They may not lead with their open source chins anymore because they have grown beyond being “just an open source company”, but they still know where their bread is buttered and that is a good thing.