Open-source software is likely to remain in certain niches, former Red Hat VP Erik Troan says, but open source is increasingly becoming a necessary foundation.
Open source, Erik Troan emphasizes, is not a business model. It’s not an economic model. It’s not a technological model.
It’s a set of value propositions. It’s a community. It’s a foundation upon which – gasp! – even proprietary programs can be built.
Though certain open source software is bound to stay or become popular – Firefox, for example – software is not the future of open source, Troan said in an interview. And Troan knows a little bit about open source, as he was one of the first employees of Red Hat, where he rose to vice president of engineering by the time it went public.
The future of open source is in the middle.
Middleware, that would be – tools for businesses, such as systems management software, xml toolkits. Things that make things work.
Linux has been successful, he pointed out, because a bunch of coders who wanted to use Linux got together and created it. Firefox has worked because there’s a huge community of people who want to use it who have the skills to code it.
But if you’re an artist, you’re going to use Adobe’s Photoshop. Even the staunchest open-source advocates, if they’re serious about graphic art, use Photoshop. Sure, Gimp is a nice open-source alternative, but it’s not really serious. And his reasoning made sense: the community most likely to use Photoshop or Gimp isn’t heavy on people who would be able to or have the time/inclination to help develop the software.
That doesn’t mean anything bad about the community at all. Not everyone is a coder, a developer. People have different skills and interests. That’s why open source can be successful in the middle, he said. Because the tools are helping people who are building software, platforms and other stuff.
They want to take the tools home and fiddle with them, play with them, figure out if they’re what they need. Maybe tweak here or there if they figure out a better way to achieve something. And if something proprietary is built using open-source components, it can be easier to make things compatible with it.
That’s why even Microsoft is beginning to embrace open source, Troan said. Or, at least, not punching it in the face when it walks in the room.
“I think there’s people at Microsoft that understand now that open source is not a business model nor an economic model,” he said. The company used to hear “open source” and think, “We have to fight this as hard as we can.
“Open source is really much more complicated than that,” Troan said. “Almost every large user of open source is paying for it.” Microsoft sees that and sees that open source could, potentially, become another revenue stream. And if Microsoft were really to start playing friendly with the OSS community, that could generate a lot of goodwill.
Plus, most of the people who download something for free weren’t going to pay for it anyway. (Sounds kind of like what’s going on in the media industries right now: the iTunes micropayment model is as wildly successful as Napster once was. Maybe more so. But there are plenty of sites where people can still go to download movies, music and TV shows without paying.)
“People who really need it are going to pay for it,” he said. “They need to.”
Troan’s (relatively) new company, rPath, is in that middle ground. They’re “providing tools for scale-out.” Maybe a few years ago, 50 was a large number of machines to be running. Now, 10,000 machines isn’t huge. rPath is creating a version control system in the cloud. It will develop a virtual database of every single piece of data on a system, easy to pull down and run different pieces on different machines.
That’s the kind of thing that allows, say, a company like Google to roll out changes to all its users in groups instead of to everyone at once. (Not that Google is an rPath customer, but it’s a good analogy that everyone can relate to, OK?)
The increasing number of machines that many companies are running, however, also makes open source more attractive because the licensing costs don’t grow exponentially.
What people are really paying for in open source is editing, said Troan, channeling his grandfather, who was a newspaper editor for decades. They’re relying on other people to pick out the bits of code and pieces of software that do what they need to get done once they’re put together.
Hmm. Maybe the newspaper industry needs to give Troan a call.
