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Fred Langa is a senior consulting editor and columnist for Windows Magazine. Fred's free weekly newsletter is available via subscribe@langa.com. You can contact him at fred@langa.com or via his website at http://www.langa.com.

Open-Source Split?

By Fred Langa

The open-source movement sparks deep-felt emotions. Almost a year ago, Netscape announced it was releasing its source code, and at the same moment, some open-source supporters were calling for Microsoft to release the source code for Windows.

At the time, I wrote a column on the topic of open sourcing; although the specific topic addressed the call to open Windows' source, the column also asked the more general question, "Is it good business to give away your source code?" It's still a good question today, and it came up at a prominent open-source forum last week.

It was a panel discussion among some of the open source world's luminaries, including Linux creator Linus Torvalds, Perl scripting language creator Larry Wall, Python programming language creator Guido Van Rossum, and Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman (see story). The discussion revealed a deep and widening rift between two camps in the open-software movement.

Linux is the poster child of the open-source movement: It's moved astonishingly far and fast, in no small part because it's open and free.

The more ardent open-source advocates inextricably link those two elements: open and free. Code that's free but proprietary doesn't cut it -- just look at the disdain with which some people regard Microsoft Internet Explorer. It's not a bad browser -- I'm not aware of any objective evaluations of IE that state otherwise -- and it's free for the download. But it's not open, and that's enough for some to disparage it. (That plus the fact that it's owned by Microsoft, everyone's favorite high-tech bad guy these days.)

Similarly, with the most fervent open-source advocates, open and commercial also doesn't cut it. One practical example of this is Netscape; its source code hasn't attracted nearly the amount of attention some had predicted, and I believe that's because Netscape is now owned by America Online, as blatantly commercial an operation as there ever was. Why would anyone work for free to perfect code someone else will use to get rich?

In the same vein, some open sourcers dislike Red Hat Software for trying to commercialize Linux, even though it's the semi-commercial versions of Linux that are generating a lot of the interest in the operating system.

Torvalds, whose free and open Linux probably did more for the open-software movement than anything else, surprised some when he said that he has no particular problem with proprietary code and believes in making money with software. "The work I do that brings in the money and feeds my kids is going to be commercial software that no one is going to play around with," he said. He also urged Linux users to embrace mainstream users and mainstream software companies.

I couldn't agree more, and that was one of the points raised a year ago. Labor-of-love software is all well and good, but only to a point. To get to enterprise-class software, you need consistency, compatibility, and robustness. You need round-the-clock professional support. When something goes wrong, you can't just post a bug report on Usenet and hope readers will fix it for you out of the goodness of their hearts.

I know some of you are saying, "But wait: With open source, you have the option of going in and fixing it yourself." That's true -- but then you run the risk of making your version of the software different from everyone else's. This is what happened to Unix 20 years ago, of course, with myriad, almost-compatible versions in circulation. In a mainstream enterprise, "almost" isn't good enough, and that's exactly why most of the world's business PCs run proprietary software today. If open-source software such as Linux goes the everyone-creates-his-or-her-own-version route, it will also become balkanized.

Torvalds' clear-eyed practicality doesn't sit well with some of the open-source movement's more extreme members. Richard Stallman, for example, holds that all software should be free, period, and anything else is evil.

I think Stallman and his supporters are either naive or deliberately ignoring the practicalities of living. In Utopia, perhaps, everyone could afford to give away his or her life's work. If everyone did this all the time, the world indeed would be a wonderful place. But you may recall from grade school that another name for Utopia is "Erehwon" -- which is "nowhere" spelled backwards. Utopian ideals just don't work in the real world, where there are bills to pay and schedules to keep.

I applaud Torvalds' pragmatism. The open-software movement is a wonderful thing, and open and free software has a place in the world -- but so does open-commercial software, free-proprietary software, and proprietary-commercial software.

What's your take? Is open and/or free software the Next Big Thing, or will commercial and/or proprietary software remain the primary way enterprise-class operating systems and applications get developed? Will open-free software ever become predominant? Will we see more large software vendors opening their codebases? Join in!

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