The very real limitations of open source
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COMMENTARY--Open source interest groups have been putting pressure on national governments to make the move to open source products. Debate over the issue is active in New Zealand, Enthusiasm for the benefits of open source, however,should not be allowed to paper over the drawbacks. Specifically, open source has a critical flaw whichhas little to do with its suitability as analternative to proprietary products. That flawconsists of a lack of concrete incentive to motivatedevelopers to contribute to open source projects.
The benefits of open source are apparent. It enablescollaborative development on a global scale, as anyonewith the skills can view the code and contribute toit. It is highly flexible due to source code access(third parties can customize it completely) and therequirements of a development model wherein the atomiccontributions (as in small, not nuclear) of thousandsof developers are organized within a single product. It serves as an educational tool, as teachers can showstudents the inner workings of a production-scaleproduct. It is free, and that makes possible usagescenarios not available to fee-based products (thinklow-cost routers running a streamlined Linux OS).
The problem, however, is that open source must rely onthe willingness of programmers to contribute codewithout financial compensation. The Free SoftwareFoundation That's a big "if." Would you bet the future of thesoftware industry on it? Consider the difficultiesendured by the Mozilla project, which in contrast tomore popular open source projects such as Linux, hadtrouble attracting developer participation. Simplythrowing an open source party doesn't guarantee thatanyone will come. The number of open source programmers as a percentageof the whole is small. I don't have data beyond myown admittedly subjective industry experience, butbased on it, I would guess that maybe 5 percent to 10 percent havecontributed to such a project. The reason is not hardto fathom. Lots of things are fun. When given achoice between a "fun" activity that keeps you livingwith your parents and one that buys you a Lexus, mostwould choose the latter. This isn't irrational behavior, but a reflection of aworld where time is limited, and human beings arecreatures with a wide array of interests. Inbalancing fun tasks, material benefit enters into thecalculation, making a project that is fun AND payswell win over projects which are just fun. Open source development shows that there are a lot ofprogrammers willing to work for free. But just asstandard supply curve theory implies, the pool growsif you raise the price paid for the production ofsoftware. I imagine many would consider waitingtables if it paid $150,000 a year. More programmersare available to satisfy the needs of the industrysimply because the wage makes it worth their time. Prices (and profits) act as market signals. Whenprofits are high, it often implies that supply is lowand demand is high, attracting investment. The samething occurs in the labor market, though the signal isthe wage and what is attracted are programmers. Proprietary software will always generate more revenuethan free, open source software. That means thatprogrammers can earn more, making proprietary softwarebetter able to create the market signals that attractmore developers into the industry. A society that wants to maximize the creation of goodideas in software will embrace a market where opensource and proprietary software coexist. Open sourcelicenses will exist to "harvest" for society theproductive power of people who, for a number ofreasons, contribute free software. This is a goodthing, since more can use the result (because it isfree), more can adapt it, and others can learn fromit. The proprietary portion will exist to harvest theproductivity of programmers who, for a number of otherreasons, will only program for financial compensation. Open source software benefits society. However, aworld without proprietary software is a world thatthrows away the productive potential of those whoproduce for financial compensation, a group thatcomprises the majority of programmers. Both groups ofprogrammers produce good ideas. Consumers (includingnational governments) should have the right to decidewhether the fee-based ones are worth the price. John Carroll is a software engineer who lives in Switzerland. He specializes in the design and development of distributed systems using Java and .Net.
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