Amiram Hayardeny's My China Experience

The Open Revolution

Indeed, I work for Sun Microsystems, and indeed, Sun promotes Open Source software.  It's been doing so for many years now.  My personal blog is just that, personal.  If you take a quick look at my posts, you shall find that almost all of them describe my personal experiences, adventures, impressions, observations.  They describe my feelings, thoughts and philosophies.  Less than a handful discuss work related topics, and even those are covered from a very personal viewpoint.  You can judge now.  You can choose to classify this post as a "Sun employee doing his job", or you can choose to classify it as "a technologist who has been exposed to numerous technologies over the years, and is trying to point out to as many people as possible that the way of the future is Open.  Open standards, open source and open hearts.  Free choice.  Your choice.

The trigger for this post was a news item:

BRUSSELS, Belgium -- The European Union's top antitrust official has called on member governments to use open-source software, an apparent jab at Microsoft's proprietary technology."No citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to choose a closed technology over an open one, through a government having made that choice first," European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said last week at a conference organized by OpenForum Europe, a nonprofit group that advocates open standards.  Choosing technology formats that can be used by different vendors -- often without paying a fee -- is "a very smart business decision," Kroes said.

Consider the choice of words.  Ms. Kroes did not say it's more fun to use open-source software.  She didn't imply that it was cheaper.  She didn't mention the community aspects, the contributions.  She chose to look at it from the business viewpoint, she brought up the business benefits rather than the individual's.  In her words: "a very smart business decision".  The reason I chose to write this post, and use my personal blog to publish it was to try and remove some myths about Open technology, to try and open people's eyes into accepting, installing, using, and contributing to open software.

The other trigger was a few days later, with the release of the much anticipated (by me and quite a few millions of others) Firefox 3.0.  It was a nice gimmick to add the "lets break the Guinness Record for downloads in twenty four hours".  In fact, only five million downloads were necessary for breaking the record.  The outcome, though, exceeded even the most optimistic predictions.  Eight million downloads in twenty four hours.  I am proud to have been four of them.  Every computer in the house was installed with the new Firefox.  Why do I like Firefox better?  Probably for the same reason the other fourteen million people who downloaded since.  It's great technology, developed by communities, tested by millions, and expanded by millions more.  It's rather outstanding.  And by the way, if I need a good extension which isn't available today, there's a good chance it will be available tomorrow.

I am well aware of the many myths surrounding open-source software.  Let me describe a few, and try to explain why they are nothing more than myths.

The Open-Source Cult Myth - only bearded geeks, with bottle bottom spectacles and athlete's foot take part in development communities.  Completely untrue.  Community developers are engineers by profession or by hobby, whose first and foremost motivation is to be able to do something they currently can't, and the drive to have other people share the feature.  Why?  Because they understand that sharing their own is a good motivation for others to share their expertise as well, resulting in millions of people contributing talent others don't have.

The Open-Source Free (As in Free Lunch) Myth - indeed, you can download it, use it, change it, and even redistribute it (pay attention to the license, it may be different).  But please consider.  If you want to run your business on it, if you have a data center, customers, mission critical applications, you may want support.  You may want to be able to call someone on New Year's Eve at 2:00 AM and ask for help.  That, my friend, isn't free.  That comes with a service contract.  So if you were wondering about the business model of companies that are in the open source business, then there you have it.  Subscriptions and support pay the bills.  I'm not sure what the percentage of source code that Red Hat contributes to Linux, or SuSE, or Mozilla.com.  But it is obvious to me that they're doing pretty well.  Selling distributions and support is the answer.

There's No Free Lunch - this isn't a myth.  But if we indeed compare software to lunches, we shall find that there's quite a difference.  Most people are likely to pay for their lunch after they have consumed it.  You seldom get to try your lunch first, see if you like the flavor, and test how your digestive system reacts to it.  You select, you consume, you pay.  Then you may come back for more or spend the night with your head in the bowl.  With open source software you get to test the flavor, change the menu, dd some dishes if you wish, see if the results are to your liking, and pay only if you're absolutely satisfied.  You can get up and leave anytime, if you wish, at no cost...  Free of charge?  No sir.  Convenient, safe, customizable, yes indeed.

The Open-Source Poor Quality Myth - Imagine that.  Firefox 3.0 released after many months of alpha and beta versions used by millions.  Yes, me too.  Millions who used it the way the use any browser.  They opened bugs, and some actually delivered the fix as well.  Commercial, close code applications can't possibly compete with the power of the community - in testing and in fixing.  Open source projects have better chances of being of much better quality than commercial ones.  Years ago, Firefox was dismissed by the commercial software giants.  I believe that at 20% of market share and growing, it isn't dismissed anymore.  I am proud to say that although I have a couple of machines at home using Windows, none of them is running Explorer.  I'm not a religious fanatic about MS.  I simply like Firefox better.  A lot better.

Remember, source code is in a common repository.  It needs action, selection, choice, and good professionals to actually make something useful out of it.  Not all source code from the repository actually makes it to the distribution.  Only some.  The distributions that eventually hit the market come with a good choice of packages, quality assurance and are well tested.  Let me explain further.  Linux is a collection of source code.  Gnu Linux, or Red Hat Linux or Red Flag Linux are distributions.  They aren't the same, they aren't even close.  Same with OpenSolaris.  Solaris is a bunch of files.  Solaris 10 is a distribution and so is OpenSolaris, now from Sun.

Here's my prediction.  A few years from now commercial close source applications, including operating systems, databases, virtualization engines, even games, will be a thing of the past.  Robust open source applications will replace them all, providing users, customers, businesses with (you thought I was going to write - better applications?  Wrong) choices to make.  Choices between a quickly changing application, to a very stable one.  Between games and serious business applications.  Between generic and customized, between being a user, to being a contributor.

I must add this.  Someone a lot bigger than me already figured it out.  That's one of the reasons Yahoo was being courted for acquisition.  Tomorrow's business model in software is delivering service, not code.  Advertising is a good way of making in a buck in tomorrow's world.  Selling DVDs, investing billions of dollars in pirating prevention is the way of the past.  Where do you belong?

* Written in Open Office, posted with WordPress in Firefox from OpenSolaris.

Posted at 03:25PM Jun 22, 2008 by Amiram Hayardeny in Personal  |  Comments[0]