The real power of the open source movement

The software giants have really missed the boat on the open source movement. If there was an opportunity in which they could have participated, it is long gone. It is not just that open source software producers are contending for market share, that they produce more secure products with more revisions, or that their basic philosophy flies in the face of the traditional business model. The movement has little to do with money or quality, and everything to do with developer control. The main players of the by-gone era -- Microsoft, Sun, IBM -- and other dominant software producers and supporters all stand to lose a lot by missing this salient point.

The open source business model frameworks do not provide a value add superior to the traditional business models. What they provide instead is a model conducive to developer job entry. Take me, for instance: I have always had a passion for coding. I went to a large university, where I took a lot of theoretical courses that had us using obtuse languages that were not practical. I wanted something I could sink my teeth into right away. Enter Perl. It was a great language that ran on all the operating systems that I was being exposed to: mainly, Unix and Windows. It was free to install and the books were cheap. I was writing my own evolutionary algorithms in no time!

By this time, the other contender for developer mindshare was Microsoft, particular with its Visual suite of languages like C++ and BASIC. Now, I was aware that I could do cool things with these tools, and I knew full well that having expertise in them would widen my job opportunities. But I was less than enthused about learning any of these languages.

The first obstacle to overcome was scarcity of learning material. Visual C++ was poorly documented anywhere. The only way to learn it was with overpriced books and off-campus courses. Contrast that with languages like GNU C and Perl, which were taught in very cheap books and documented very thoroughly on the web. Not to mention, the style of the books differed dramatically. Kernigan and Richie's little white book and the O'Reilly Learning Perl book were concise, well organized, and fun to read. The smallest Visual Basic book was at least 800 pages, and it never got to the point. After a verbose introduction to the wonders of Microsoft, you had to wade through paragraph upon paragraph of trite, condescending demagoguy mostly about business management. When would we get to the good stuff, I needed to know. I just wanted to get busy writing my own Eliza.

The open source movement is not about free or cheap or even better software. It is about giving the power to the developers. It is very expensive for developers to learn the Microsoft platform and viable languages. This may have worked back in the day when a company just committed itself to a platform and sent its engineers to get Microsoft certified! But not every employer can pay for the training; they need to hire people in with previous experience. And since software engineers have been saturating the unemployment ranks, they have had to get that experience on their own or find another line of work.

The Linux platform and its free, portable languages (Perl, Java, Python, Tk/Tcl) allow much easier market entry for start-ups and job entry for developers. There are many business who will miss this fact and have to re-purpose themselves when it is too late. One area where I think a big opportunity exists is in the training domain. For many years there have been numerous schools that offered certification courses for mostly Microsoft. The demand for those certifications is probably going to drop, because most developers can now demonstrate their expertise independently of any expensive course or test. But an emerging market must exist for training courses where developers can learn how to "put it all together," viz. Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python.

As the web comes into its own, desktop applications will become a backdrop to web services. There will be more investment in web services, and more companies will be focussed on that. The next challenge will be figuring out how best to deliver those services. We know that open source tools are a good foundation, but beyond that it is still anyone's guess. Somehow, the services have to built, maintained, and evolved.

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