Section 1.3. The Nature of Open Source

1.3. The Nature of Open Source

The way that open source comes to life, evolves, and finds its way to new groups of users is a profoundly democratic, decentralized, and somewhat chaotic process. For commercial software, investors demand a plan reflecting what the software will do and who will buy it. Vendors pay for sales staff, marketing and advertising departments, and conferences and events to let potential buyers know about their products. The trade press offers a steady stream of product reviews. Analysts write reports on new types of products.

Open source is a grass-roots effort. Open source developers create code to meet their own needs, and throw it up on the Internet so that others can interact with it and make it better. Nobody buys you lunch. Nobody is going to call you on the phone and suggest that using open source is a good idea. In most cases, you will have to find out about open source software yourself. It will not come to you. This is slightly less true now than it used to be (see the upcoming sidebar, "Open Source Sales and Marketing"). IBM will call you about Linux, but the conversation will quickly get to hardware and services. Newly formed support companies are also encouraging use of open source, but none of this changes the fact that open source means taking responsibility.

The way that open source grows is an amazing demonstration of community evolution. It turns out that communities are not interested in documentation until late in the cycle, and even then the documentation does not tell you what you need to know about the project's health and how well the software works.

So, when you go looking for open source to fill your needs, it can be difficult to understand what is happening with a particular project. For the most popular and widely used projects, a lot of information is available, including books, magazines, conferences, and even consultants offering services. But leaving the most popular products aside, there are many sources of raw data but a dearth of useful information.

If finding and evaluating open source is this difficult, one might ask, why bother? The reason is that open source has grown to such an extent that huge opportunities are waiting for IT departments. Many of the newly formed open source support companies are focused on drawing IT's attention to these opportunities.

A clear model of how open source software comes to life and grows is crucial for the IT community to understand what they will find when they go looking for open source. This chapter explains the life cycle of open source: how open source is created, how it evolves, what you will find when you look at an open source project, and how to make sense of this evidence. Being able to evaluate open source is particularly important for projects outside the realm of usual suspects, where much value lies waiting.

To explore the nature of open source, we will present several definitions of open source, followed by a review of the life cycle most open source projects go through. Then, the differences in the life cycle of commercial software and the end product will be analyzed and compared to that of open source software.

Open Source Sales and Marketing

While most open source products have no sales staff, companies are cropping up that sell services and products based on the most popular open source software. This arrival of commercial interests means that some open source is marketed and advertised. IBM is personifying Linux as a cute little blond boy when advertising its Linux services. Red Hat and other companies sell subscriptions to their distributions of Linux. SugarCRM and Compiere have fully developed CRM and ERP packages, respectively. Start-ups such as SpikeSource and SourceLabs are offering support services.

Commercial software vendors are increasingly using the open source licensing model for various reasons, but none of this activity has fundamentally changed how open source is born and evolves. And for the most part, after Linux, Apache, and perhaps MySQL, plus a small handful of others, few open source projects have received such attention. For most open source, if you want it, you must hunt it down yourself.