Is it really true that the only vendors truly committed to open source are the losers, companies left behind as more successful vendors add proprietary extensions to the core open source code?

I am not sure Paul Gillin, the former Computerworld editor who now works as a SiliconANGLE consultant, was really serious when he made the “losers” statement I paraphrase above, but it sounds good to me.

I take a rather jaundiced view of open source and cannot think of any project that has remained truly open all the way to wide adoption. That is, with the exception of OpenSSL, and we know how well that worked out.

To me, open source is a ruse. Mom, apple pie, wave the flag, march with the band, play baseball, write some code and share with others. Isn’t that what the French revolution was supposed to be about? Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, Logiciels Open Source!

OK, I’m a cynic. But I see open source, at least in the OpenStack sense, as a way for the industry to build software that nobody sees any value in improving. So an open source foundation is created and vendors then build customer lock-in on top of it.

Incompatible optimization

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At some level, all the apps running atop the open source foundation remain compatible, but only if you are willing to optimize for all the vendor-specific extensions. It doesn’t take too much for that extra work to convince customers to select a single vendor’s implementation and customer lock-in is largely achieved — on an open source platform!

Who does this leave committed to improving and adding to the base by creating additional open software? That’s where Gillin’s idea comes in: These are the companies that couldn’t win by going proprietary. They are not the huge names we all know and are thus “the losers.” At least in the sense of market share, their software political correctness remaining clean.

Gillin hangs around with the losers more than I. He also hangs more with the winners, so I will surrender to his logic. That I cannot name a big, happy company that is selling true open source software is what convinces me that Gillin’s right.

This doesn’t make me opposed to open source and God bless companies that keep extending the open portion of the code. They don’t deserve to be losers, but to keep a big company afloat, you need as much free code as you can get and then add features your customers want and only you implement and support. Vendor-specific compatibility is always a good thing to add.

Open source matters, but not as much as many would have us believe. Most open doors are really just small openings through a solid wall. And so it is with open software, where the openness only goes so far.

photo credit: opensourceway via photopin cc