The Success of Open Source

Steven Weber

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780674257511
• Topic: Informatica
• Subtopic: Programmazione open source

Much of the innovative programming that powers the Internet, creates operating systems, and produces software is the result of "open source" code, that is, code that is freely distributed—as opposed to being kept secret—by those who write it. Leaving source code open has generated some of the most sophisticated developments in computer technology, including, most notably, Linux and Apache, which pose a significant challenge to Microsoft in the marketplace. As Steven Weber discusses, open source's success in a highly competitive industry has subverted many assumptions about how businesses are run, and how intellectual products are created and protected.Traditionally, intellectual property law has allowed companies to control knowledge and has guarded the rights of the innovator, at the expense of industry-wide cooperation. In turn, engineers of new software code are richly rewarded; but, as Weber shows, in spite of the conventional wisdom that innovation is driven by the promise of individual and corporate wealth, ensuring the free distribution of code among computer programmers can empower a more effective process for building intellectual products. In the case of Open Source, independent programmers—sometimes hundreds or thousands of them—make unpaid contributions to software that develops organically, through trial and error.Weber argues that the success of open source is not a freakish exception to economic principles. The open source community is guided by standards, rules, decisionmaking procedures, and sanctioning mechanisms. Weber explains the political and economic dynamics of this mysterious but important market development.

CHAPTER 1

Property and the Problem of Software

This is a book about property and how it underpins the social organization of cooperation and production in a digital era. I mean “property” in a broad sense—not only who owns what, but what it means to own something, what rights and responsibilities property confers, and where those ideas come from and how they spread. It is a story of how social organization can change the meaning of property, and conversely, how shifting notions of property can alter the possibilities of social organization.

I explain the creation of a particular kind of software—open source software—as an experiment in social organization around a distinctive notion of property. The conventional notion of property is, of course, the right to exclude you from using something that belongs to me. Property in open source is configured fundamentally around the right to distribute, not the right to exclude. If that sentence feels awkward on first reading, that is a testimony to just how deeply embedded in our intuitions and institutions the exclusion view of property really is.

Open source is an experiment in building a political economy—that is, a system of sustainable value creation and a set of governance mechanisms. In this case it is a governance system that holds together a community of producers around this counterintuitive notion of property rights as distribution. It is also a political economy that taps into a broad range of human motivations and relies on a creative and evolving set of organizational structures to coordinate behavior. What would a broader version of this political economy really look like? This book uses the open source story as a vehicle for proposing a set of preliminary answers to that very large question.

The way in is to answer two more immediate questions about open source. How is it that groups of computer programmers (sometimes very large groups) made up of individuals separated by geography, corporate boundaries, culture, language, and other characteristics, and connected mainly via telecommunications bandwidth, manage to work together over time and build complex, sophisticated software systems outside the boundaries of a corporate structure and for no direct monetary compensation? And why does the answer to that question matter to anyone who is not a computer programmer?

Let me restate these questions as an observation and two general propositions that together provoked me to write this book. The observation is that collaborative open source software projects such as Linux and Apache have demonstrated that a large and complex system of software code can be built, maintained, developed, and extended in a nonproprietary setting in which many developers work in a highly parallel, relatively unstructured way. The first proposition is that this is an important puzzle for social scientists worrying about problems of both small- and large-scale cooperation (which is just about every social scientist, in one way or another). It is also an important puzzle for anyone who struggles, in theory or in practice, with the limits to very complex divisions of labor and the management of knowledge in that setting.

The second proposition is that the open source software process is a real-world, researchable example of a community and a knowledge production process that has been fundamentally changed, or created in significant ways, by Internet technology. Understanding the open source process can generate new perspectives on very old and essential problems of social cooperation. And it can provide an early perspective on some of the institutional, political, and economic consequences for human societies of the telecommunications and Internet revolutions.

This book explains how the open source software process works. It is broadly a book about technology and society, in the sense that changes in technology uncover hidden assumptions of inevitability in production systems and the social arrangements that accompany them. It is also about computers and software, because the success of open source rests ultimately on computer code, code that people often find more functional, reliable, and faster to evolve than most proprietary software built inside a conventional corporate organization. It is a business and legal story as well. Open source code does not obliterate profit, capitalism, or intellectual property rights. Companies and individuals are creating intellectual products and making money from open source software code, while inventing new business models and notions about property along the way.

Ultimately the success of open source is a political story. The open source software process is not a chaotic free-for-all in which everyone has equal power and influence. And it is certainly not an idyllic community of like-minded friends in which consensus reigns and agreement is easy. In fact, conflict is not unusual in this community; it’s endemic and inherent to the open source process. The management of conflict is politics and indeed there is a political organization at work here, with the standard accoutrements of power, interests, rules, behavioral norms, decision-making procedures, and sanctioning mechanisms. But it is not a political organization that looks familiar to the logic of an industrial-era political economy.

The Analytic Problem of Open Source

Think of a body of software code as a set of instructions for a computer—an artifact, a “thing” in and of itself. In that context, what is open source software and how is it different from the proprietary software products that companies like Microsoft and Oracle build and sell?

Consider a simple analogy to Coca-Cola.¹ Coca-Cola sells bottles of soda to consumers. Consumers use (that is, drink) the soda. Some consumers read the list of ingredients on the bottle, but that list of ingredients is surprisingly generic. Coca-Cola has a proprietary formula that it will not divulge, on the bottle or anywhere else. This formula is the knowledge that makes it possible for Coke to combine sugar, water, and a few other readily available ingredients in particular proportions with a secret flavoring mix and produce something of great value. The point is that the bubbly liquid in your glass cannot be reverse-engineered into its constituent parts. You can buy Coke and you can drink it, but you can’t understand it in a way that would let you reproduce the drink, or improve upon it and distribute your cola drink to the rest of the world.

Standard economics of intellectual property rights provides a straightforward account of why the Coca-Cola production regime is organized this way. The core problem of intellectual property is supposed to be about creating incentives for innovators. Patents, copyrights, licensing schemes, and other means of “protecting” knowledge ensure that economic rents are created and that some proportion of those rents can be appropriated by the innovator. If that were not the case, a new and improved formula would be immediately available in full and for free to anyone who chose to look at it. The person who invented the formula would have no special and defensible economic claim on a share of the profits that might be made by selling drinks engineered from the innovation. And so the system unravels, because that person no longer has any rational incentive to innovate in the first place.

The production of computer software is typically organized under a similar regime, with a parallel argument behind it. You can buy Microsoft Windows and you can use it on your computer, but you cannot reproduce it, modify it, improve it, and redistribute your own version of Windows to others. Copyright, licenses, patents, and other legal structures provide a layer of legal protection to this regime, but there is an even more fundamental mechanism that stops you from doing any of these things. Just as Coca-Cola does not release its formula, Microsoft and other proprietary software makers do not release their source code.

Source code is a list of instructions that make up the “recipe” for a software package. Software engineers write source code in a programming language (like C++ or FORTRAN) that a human can read and understand, as well as fix and modify. Most commercial software is released in machine language or what are called “binaries”—a long string of ones and zeros that a computer can read and execute, but a human cannot read.² The source code is basically the recipe for the binaries; and if you have the source code, you can understand what the author was trying to accomplish when she wrote the program—which means you can modify it. If you have just the binaries, you typically cannot either understand or modify them. Therefore, shipping binary code is a very effective way for proprietary software companies to control what you can do with the software you buy.

Proprietary source code is the touchstone of the conventional intellectual property regime for computer software. Proprietary source code is supposed to be the fundamental reason why Microsoft can sell Windows for around $100 (or why Oracle can sell its sophisticated data management software for many thousands of dollars) and distribute some of that money to programmers who write the code—and thus provide incentives for them to innovate.

Open source software simply inverts this logic. The essence of open source software is that source code is free. That is, the source code for open source software is released along with the software to anyone and everyone who chooses to use it. “Free” in this context means freedom (not necessarily zero price). Free source code is open, public, and nonproprietary. As Richard Stallman puts it, freedom includes the right to run the program for any purpose, to study how it works and adapt it to your own needs, to redistribute copies to others, and to improve the program and share your improvements with the community so that all benefit.³ Programmers often explain it with simple shorthand: when you hear the term free software, think “free speech” not “free beer.” Or, in pseudo-French, software libre not software gratis.

The core of this new model is captured in three essential features of the semiofficial “Open Source Definition”:

• Source code must be distributed with the software or otherwise made available for no more than the cost of distribution.

• Anyone may redistribute the software for free, without royalties or licensing fees to the author.

• Anyone may modify the software or derive other software from it, and then distribute the modified software under the same terms.⁴

If you array these terms against the conventional intellectual property story for software, open source software really should not exist. Or at best it should be confined to small niches outside the mainstream information technology economy, perhaps among a tightly bound group of enthusiastic hobbyists who create and share source code for the love of the challenge.

Here’s the empirical problem: Open source software is a real, not marginal, phenomenon. It is already a major part of the mainstream information technology economy, and it increasingly dominates aspects of that economy that will probably be the leading edge (in technological and market terms) over the next decade. There exist thousands of open source projects, ranging from small utilities and device drivers to office suites like OpenOffice, database systems like MySQL, and operating systems like Linux and BSD derivatives.⁵ Linux and Apache attract the most public attention. Apache simply dominates the web server market—over 65 percent of all active web sites use Apache.⁶ Nearly 40 percent of large American companies use Linux in some form; Linux is the operating system for more than a third of active web servers and holds almost 14 percent of the large server market overall.⁷

Sendmail is an open source email transfer and management program that powers about 80 percent of the world’s mail servers. BIND is an open source program that acts as the major addressing system for the Internet. If you use Google to search the web, you use a cluster of 10,000 computers running Linux. Yahoo! runs its directory services on FreeBSD, another open source operating system. If you saw the movies Titanic or Lord of the Rings, you were watching special effects rendered on Linux machines that are running at companies like Disney, Dream-Works, and Pixar. Increasingly, open source software is running major enterprise applications for large and small corporations alike. Amazon, E*Trade, Reuters, and Merrill Lynch are examples of companies that have recently switched backend computer systems to Linux. Large parts of the U.S. government, including the Defense Department, the Department of Energy, and the National Security Agency, work with open source software. National, state, and municipal governments from Germany to Peru to China are considering and in some cases mandating the use of open source software for e-government applications. IBM is now a major champion of open source after publicly declaring in 2001 a $1 billion commitment to developing technology and recasting central parts of its business models around Linux and other open source programs. Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Dell, Oracle, Intel, and Sun Microsystems have all made serious (if less radical) commitments to open source software.

The fact that Linux is probably not running your desktop computer today does not diminish the significance of what is happening with open source. That is partly because more PCs and computing appliances will run Linux and open source programs in the next few years.⁸ But Windows on your desktop is not important for a more fundamental reason, and that is because your PC desktop is becoming much less important. Even Microsoft knows and acknowledges this—that recognition is at the heart of the company’s move toward web services and the “dot-net” architecture. Sun Microsystems claimed a long time ago that “the network is the computer” and the technology is upholding that claim. Your desktop is like the steering wheel to your car—important, but not nearly as important as the engine. The engine is the Internet, and it is increasingly built on open source software.

Computer scientists and software engineers value Linux and other open source software packages primarily for their technical characteristics. But as open source has begun over the last several years to attract more public attention, it has taken on a peculiar mantle and become a kind of Internet era Rorschach test. People often see in the open source software movement the politics that they would like to see—a libertarian reverie, a perfect meritocracy, a utopian gift culture that celebrates an economics of abundance instead of scarcity, a virtual or electronic existence proof of communitarian ideals, a political movement aimed at replacing obsolete nineteenth-century capitalist structures with new “relations of production” more suited to the Information Age.

It is almost too easy to criticize some of the more lavish claims. Like many things about the Internet era, open source software is an odd mix of overblown hype and profound innovation. The hype should be at least partly forgiven. The open source phenomenon is in some ways the first and certainly one of the most prominent indigenous political statements of the digital world. Unlike the shooting star that was Napster, the roots of open source go back to the beginning of modern computing; it is a productive movement intimately linked to the mainstream economy; and it is developing and growing an increasingly self-conscious identification as a community that specifies its own norms and values.

Some of those values sound extraordinarily compelling, particularly when compared to darkly dystopic visions of the Internet-enabled society as one in which computer code leads to a radically privatized, perfectly regulated, tightly controlled world in which technology enforces upon the many the shape of a market that is preferred by and benefits the few. In the widely read book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig repeatedly invokes the idea of open source as a major challenge and counterpoint to the possibilities for government and corporate control of the architecture that will help shape the e-society. He implies that this is part of an almost epochal battle over who will control what in the midst of a technolog...