Shiv­an Jaikaran

Huh? You can ben­e­fit from Open Source Soft­ware? This ques­tion usu­al­ly paints a con­fus­ing sce­nario in the lo­cal IT com­mu­ni­ty and brings about many mis­con­cep­tions The an­swer to this ques­tion will be ap­proached from two dif­fer­ent an­gles, from a de­vel­op­ers point of view and then a busi­ness point of view.

What is Open Source Soft­ware (OSS)?

The term "open source soft­ware" is usu­al­ly re­placed with "free soft­ware" and in a nut­shell, it means just that. Typ­i­cal­ly, one can down­load OSS freely, mod­i­fy it, re-dis­trib­ute it, make im­prove­ments and even sell it! Please read here for a more de­tailed de­f­i­n­i­tion of Open Source Soft­ware.

Of course, there are dif­fer­ent types of Open Source (OS) li­cens­es.

Con­verse­ly, closed source soft­ware is quite the op­po­site. You pay for closed source soft­ware ei­ther by pur­chas­ing it "out of the box" or by pay­ing for li­censed copies of it. The best way to iden­ti­fy the ma­jor dif­fer­ences be­tween the two types of soft­ware is by giv­ing ex­am­ples.

Open source soft­ware

Closed source equiv­a­lent

Fire­fox

In­ter­net Ex­plor­er

Lin­ux OS

Win­dows OS

Open Of­fice

Mi­crosoft Of­fice

Gimp

Pho­to­shop

It is ar­guable that one can ac­com­plish the same tasks ef­fi­cient­ly us­ing the OS ver­sion of a soft­ware in the ma­jor­i­ty of cas­es.

Mis­con­cep­tions

By now, you are prob­a­bly as­sum­ing some of the most typ­i­cal myths of OSS such as:

If it's free, it can't be that good right? Noth­ing free is ever good.

If its free, the de­vel­op­ers do not make mon­ey from it.

If you need sup­port, there is no where to go or no one to blame since no one per­son/com­pa­ny owns OSS.

OSS is less se­cure.

OSS is hard to use.

These mis­con­cep­tions are re­al­ly far from the truth and the fol­low­ing il­lus­trates why.

Mis­con­cep­tion #1 � Yes OSS is free to ob­tain or down­load but it is not free to de­vel­op. De­vel­op­ers have to live too. Even though there are a sub­stan­tial num­ber of de­vel­op­ers con­tribut­ing to open source projects freely, ini­tial­ly the project start­ed be­cause one or­gan­i­sa­tion out there, found a need that a cus­tomized soft­ware could ful­fill. This or­gan­i­sa­tion hired a team of de­vel­op­ers and in­vest­ed in its de­vel­op­ment. Pret­ty soon, an­oth­er com­pa­ny start­ed us­ing the soft­ware and quick­ly re­alised there are miss­ing fea­tures that can al­so ben­e­fit oth­er com­pa­nies. They pay to have these fea­tures im­ple­ment­ed and now the project as a whole has just grown by a few fea­tures. Ex­trap­o­late this by hun­dreds of com­pa­nies and thou­sands of de­vel­op­ers around the world and you will see how quick­ly a suc­cess­ful open source project can evolve glob­al­ly.

Mis­con­cep­tion #2 � A lot of de­vel­op­ers con­tribute to OSS freely for var­i­ous per­son­al rea­sons such as: per­son­al grat­i­fi­ca­tion, hob­bies, fame etc. How­ev­er, there are al­ways a core set of de­vel­op­ers that are be­ing paid to con­tin­u­al­ly fos­ter the growth of the OS project by adding new fea­tures, fix­ing bugs, re­spond­ing to se­cu­ri­ty flaws and gen­er­al main­te­nance of the en­tire project.

Mis­con­cep­tion #3 � OSS is more com­mu­ni­ty ori­ent­ed and for each OS project you will cer­tain­ly find a sup­port fo­rum for sup­port ques­tions or a doc­u­men­ta­tion sec­tion. Al­though this does not seem like a log­i­cal choice for many com­pa­nies, de­vel­op­ers of the project can al­so be paid to pro­vide sup­port. For the more pop­u­lar OSS, there are com­pa­nies that spe­cialise in pro­vid­ing sup­port for it. There are, in fact, com­pa­nies in Trinidad and To­ba­go that pro­vide open source soft­ware sup­port.

Mis­con­cep­tion #4 � Imag­ine a closed source project that in­volves a team of de­vel­op­ers sit­ting a room ham­mer­ing away at code, try­ing to find se­cu­ri­ty flaws and make im­prove­ments. Now, imag­ine a team of thou­sands of de­vel­op­ers around the world ham­mer­ing at OS code and fix­ing se­cu­ri­ty flaws. Nat­u­ral­ly, se­cu­ri­ty patch­es are found and im­ple­ment­ed quick­er in OSS. The OS project evolves at a much faster rate and is more se­cure as a re­sult.

Mis­con­cep­tion #5 � With every soft­ware there is a learn­ing curve. Closed source soft­ware usu­al­ly come with pret­ty glossy man­u­als while at min­i­mum, an OSS will come with a text doc­u­ment which is termed "doc­u­men­ta­tion". Ad­mit­ted­ly, a glossy man­u­al is more at­trac­tive, than a plain text doc­u­ment. How­ev­er, once you can over­come this "flaw" of OS projects, the learn­ing curve flat­tens out. Re­cent­ly, for the more pop­u­lar OSS, there are books sur­fac­ing, writ­ten tu­to­ri­als and screen casts all avail­able on­line to help the end user make ef­fi­cient use of the soft­ware.

While these mis­con­cep­tions can be dealt with on a case by case ba­sis, I still have not an­swered the burn­ing ques­tion: How can you as the de­vel­op­er or busi­ness ben­e­fit from Open Source Soft­ware?

De­vel­op­ers: How can you ben­e­fit from OOS?

As men­tioned ear­li­er, com­pa­nies pay de­vel­op­ers to pro­vide sup­port for the soft­ware. There are nu­mer­ous way to pro­vide sup­port. You can in­stall/con­fig­ure, add new fea­tures, pro­vide se­cu­ri­ty en­hance­ments, write doc­u­men­ta­tion, pro­vide train­ing for end users or fix bugs.

Al­ter­na­tive­ly, you are al­lowed to cus­tomise your own ver­sion of an OSS, brand it, mar­ket and sell it. Pro­vid­ing in­stal­la­tion, cus­tomi­sa­tions and en­hance­ments is where the re­al mon­ey is. You have to prove to the mar­ket that you are a se­ri­ous ven­dour sup­port for open source soft­ware. Whilst the code is in­deed freely avail­able to view­ing by the pub­lic and the com­pa­ny can ex­tend it them­selves in-house, most com­pa­nies do not have the time to un­der­take these tasks, main­ly be­cause it is not their core busi­ness. These com­pa­nies will in­stead turn to you, the de­vel­op­er.

The open source rev­enue mod­el is one based on a ser­vice rev­enue stream rather than a li­cence rev­enue stream. This har­bours com­pe­ti­tion for ven­dours pro­vid­ing sup­port ser­vices. Al­though OSS is copy­right­ed and li­censed un­der spe­cial OS li­cens­es, it still al­lows for free re-dis­tri­b­u­tion in most cas­es. It is this char­ac­ter­is­tic which pro­pels the dis­tinc­tive eco­nom­ic ben­e­fits that OS ac­cu­mu­lates. In turn, this at­tracts a num­ber of po­ten­tial cus­tomers (who would have prob­a­bly nev­er con­sid­ered the soft­ware), and they in turn will need sup­port at some point in the fu­ture.

Busi­ness­es: How can you ben­e­fit from OOS?

In Trinidad and To­ba­go, OSS has pen­e­trat­ed the mar­ket to a cer­tain sig­nif­i­cant ex­tent, but cer­tain­ly not to the ex­tent that closed source soft­ware has. Why? No one re­al­ly knows, but if I had to give a cal­cu­lat­ed guess, I would say a lack of aware­ness, a cul­tur­al at­ti­tude to­wards pay­ing for soft­ware and/or ob­tain­ing pro­pri­ety soft­ware il­le­gal­ly.

For many of the closed source soft­ware used in to­day's busi­ness, there are at least one good com­pet­i­tive OS equiv­a­lent. Clear­ly, the ini­tial ben­e­fit to any com­pa­ny from OSS, is the mon­ey saved. In­stead of pay­ing for soft­ware (ei­ther by buy­ing li­censed copies of it or pur­chas­ing it off the shelf) and then pay­ing for in­stal­la­tion/con­fig­u­ra­tion, why not ob­tain the free OS equiv­a­lent? First­ly, you save on li­cence costs and you can then in­stead use that mon­ey to in­vest in the soft­ware for miss­ing fea­tures or even ob­tain train­ing for your users of the soft­ware.

Did I men­tion that OSS is in­fi­nite­ly cus­tomiz­able? In com­par­i­son to pro­pri­ety soft­ware, you are stuck with the fea­ture set of­fered. This is cer­tain­ly not the case for OSS and many peo­ple do not re­alise this.

From a busi­ness' per­spec­tive, it is al­ways bet­ter to mold a soft­ware to fit the busi­ness needs rather than mold a busi­ness to fit the soft­ware needs.

Mr. Shiv­an Jaikaran is an In­ter­net en­thu­si­ast and free­lance web de­vel­op­er who ap­pre­ci­ates how easy the web makes his life while striv­ing to em­pow­er oth­ers to do the same.