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June 01, 2003
OSCOM wrap-up
First, some quotes
"I am a sociologist. I study open source programmers."
"She works for SUN!"
"What I want...I want not to be like what you just said."
"Brent's law of CMS URLs: the more expensive the CMS, the crappier the URLs"
CMSes that seem to have traction
There were lots of talks by CMS vendors. The following CMSes stood out as the subjects of talks by people who are deploying with them:
WebGUI - To be used by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard
TYPO3 - In production at the University of Missouri/Rolla
Zope Content Management Framework - Powers the next version of Boston.Com, which will be going live some time this week
Open source: what and why
A recurring theme was what it means to be open source and why to be open source. The first panel on Wednesday had representatives from several open source companies. They were charged with answering the question, can you make money with open source? The answer was of course, "yes, and the fact that we're here proves it." But this is a glib answer because it doesn't take long-term viability into account.
A poignant answer came from Ed Kelly, an attorney who services a number of VC firms. He summarized the VC viewpoint thusly
It's hard to make money from software no matter what. You give up certain business advantages by being open source, so you'd better be able to a) show that you planned to be open source all along rather than having stumbled into it b) point to specific business advantages that motivated your choice.
The open source companies pointed to the marketing and labor advantages of being open source.
I was mildly disappointed that this panel was oriented towards business. Profits are concrete and indisputable. From a pure business perspective it's hard to argue for giving up a revenue stream. Well I guess it's the Ph.D. in me, but I would have really enjoyed more discussion about philosophy and the effects of economic models on innovation and distribution of wealth.
In his keynote, Dave Winer asked the end users in audience why they would choose open source over commercial software (he didn't like the term "proprietary"). The consensus was:
1. I don't want my data locked in a closed format.
2. I want to be able to pay someone to fix bugs in this program five and ten years from now.
Dave pointed out that these goals can be accomplished with software that is not freely redistributable. Some of Userland's products, for example, ship with source code because Dave knew that a small portion of users would actually inspect and maybe change it. Dave's assumption was that this wouldn't lead to massive amounts of unauthorized redistribution. This is an interesting middle ground. Another option batted around was the idea of putting source code in escrow, so that consumers wouldn't be helpless if the producer went out of business or otherwise failed to fix bugs.
Okay this isn't everything but I'm tapped out.
Posted by Andrew Grumet at June 1, 2003 08:27 PM
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Yes, those goals require Open, but not necessarily Free software.
Not mentioned by the users is the systems effect of being able to create an inter-company space for freely evolving good standards and common practices that tend to foster interoperability. All the competing companies in a closed design space are trying to advantage their software by locking in special features that only they can or do provide. I guess this relates back to the "no closed formats" requirement, but there is the sentiment expressed in a recent /. story on the idea that "standard by committee" efforts tend to accumulate these "special features", often optional, that are pushed by the political force of companies in the interest of profit rather than functionality and interoperability concerns.
True open source and particularly GPL style viral licenses are better at creating a community space around a particular technlology. I have been starting to make the argument that the claimed "unfreeness" of the GPL actually makes it better at supporting "creative networks of cooperating virtual companies" because of both the way this supports collaborative development of new feature sets, and also that the GPL actually limits the what is given away so that a) competition can't benefit without contributing and b) better retained value for selling commercial licenses side-by-side with the GPL release to markets that want to actually buy a version not encumbered by GPL restrictions (i.e. dual licensing aproaches).
I'm with you WRT the philosophy and effects on innovation and wealth. In my view, the solution to this is not to ask for-profit companies to start and fully fund large scale OSS projects, but to lobby and fund-raise for more support of accademic and independent OSS lab space (probably primarily virtual).
Posted by: Gerry Gleason at June 2, 2003 12:55 PM