Section 5.1. Business and Politics

5.1. Business and Politics

This chapter is about business. Software is deep in the modern economy: it provides the mechanism for the flow of capital around the world, and it is itself a good that can be produced, bought, and sold. Whenever something interesting happens in the world of software, business leaders pay attention.

Open source is interesting. It enforces new rules for use and distribution of software products. It changes the economics of software production. It impacts the way that companies can capitalize on the software they control.

At the same time, though, open source has no business agenda. Open source is about freedom in the political sense. It is about peer review and scientific collaboration. Open source licenses take no position whatsoever on the profitability of business models. Open source is not antibusiness; it has no opinion.

Businesspeople, of course, have opinions on open source. Some years ago, when open source was still new to the business community, it was unfamiliar, and that unfamiliarity bred fear, confusion, and opposition. More recently, as quality open source software products have proven their value to all kinds of businesses, that opinion has shifted. Most businesspeople who have thought about open source at all are guardedly interested in it, and want to find ways to use it in their companies to be more efficient, to spend less, or to earn more.

An informed opinion on open source is important. Just as software is a powerful economic force, open source is a powerful force in the development and deployment of modern software systems. The Internet, including the World Wide Web, and a wide range of the services that run on it (for example, e-commerce sites such as Amazon.com; information retrieval services such as Google; and portals such as Yahoo!) exist because of open source software. Open source is a genie that is too big for its bottle. Now that it is out, it will not fit back in. If you do not put it to work for you, it is likely to wreak bad magic on your business.

My own opinion on open source is simple. It is one tool among many that can, when used sensibly, create business value. I run a business based on open source, but my agenda is commercial, not political. I understand the politics behind open source, and I appreciate and respect many smart people in the open source community. When I sit down at my desk, though, I am more interested in the difference between income and expenses on my profit and loss statement. To the extent that open source helps move that difference in the right direction, I care deeply about it.

The open source business strategy about which I know the mostand the focus of this chapteris called dual licensing. Dual licensing is a way to make a single software product available under two different licenses. One is an open source license, and encourages sharing and collaboration. The other is a more conventional proprietary license, and permits secrecy and competitionwhich promote the creation of proprietary value. Dual licensing is a way to give a single product to open source users on open source terms, and to paying proprietary customers on conventional proprietary terms.