Agylen

An interesting debate is going on among a few prominent bloggers, most of whom I know personally, around the concept of Open Source and the risk it runs of being watered down by clueless companies trying to bend and exploit it for their own ends.

It all started with feather (the ASF marketing blog) quoting my friend and colleague Gianugo:

I think I’ve been through enough winters to understand that the world is a competitive pool full of sharks and deal with it, but still I’m disturbed by the number of people trying to exploit the Open Source wave with little to no clue.

Then Sylvain chimed in with:

There’s been a number of companies jumping in the Open Source bandwagon lately, using it merely as a marketing tool to find new creative ways of locking in customers.

Later Matt puts forward his disagreement:

I do think that the “real” open source community tends to view itself through an elitist frame sometimes, and fetishes over what’s being kept back rather than what is being given away. The upshot of even the lamest of open source companies is that a huge amount of code (much more than if the “real” community were left to its own devices - just take a look at the growth in Sourceforge since the mudbloods invaded) is now free. This is a positive thing, whatever the negatives (and I’ve written similarly to Gianugo’s comments before.

Finally, we have Matthew who does not want to take sides:

A bit like quantum physics (if you’ll pardon the glossing over) - the more people look at Open Source (with their varied backgrounds and goals), the more Open Source itself will change to become - well, who knows. Being successful in this marketplace will also mean being able to adapt quickly to the changes within Open Source and within the software business as a whole.

Personally, I too think that community is more important than code and that Darwinian selection will weed out certain companies, or at least their Open Source strategies, in the end. However, I’m not so sure we need to clarify what Open Source really stands for and that we risk being confused with “the suckers out there”. Regardless of the field we’re playing in, we’re bound to find opportunistic players, but we shouldn’t be afraid of being perceived to be one and the same with them, just as Rijkaard shouldn’t be afraid of being lumped together with Mourinho (I guess Matt will agree with me here. By the way, as I’m writing this the match is still 0-0 but Barcelona seems to be able to score sooner or later).

Most of all, I agree with Matthew: “it’s the customer who will, in the end, define what commercial Open Source turns out to be.”

Technorati Tags: open source, asf.