Open source equals software freedom, not free software

Vivek Ranadive, CEO of Tibco, is one of the industry’s big thinkers, complete with a profile in Esquire. So why would a smart guy like him dismiss open source as “fool’s gold”? And why do some software vendors believe they can justify “FRAND terms” on software standards and permit patented capabilities to be inserted into software standards?

These anachronisms and more arise from the “price frame” surrounding open source software. A result of misunderstanding the meaning of the word “free” in “free software,” the price frame has been the Rosetta Stone for decoding open source for the past decade. But that’s ending, now that we’re able to see the true power of open source in ecosystems like OpenStack, where the price of a license is barely relevant.

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Parsing the price frame

For software users, the top driver at the start of the last decade was certainly the word “free.” The price of a license to use any open source software is $0 if you’re willing to make the binary yourself or if someone makes one for general distribution. This was the major motivation for early adopters back in 1998, when the Open Source Initiative was formed. But the null price is an artifact of software freedom rather than its goal, and I believe a fixation on “free” has held back our understanding of open source for a decade — and continues to fixate the marketing messages of software dinosaurs.

In particular, I’m referring to the linguistic context created by “price frame,” an idea popularized by George Lakoff. The power of the common understanding of “free” leads us to view the whole domain of open source in terms of money. Thus, we hear open source being both attacked and defined in terms of “business model,” “monetization,” “royalty-free,” “licensing,” “TCO,” “intellectual property,” and so on.

The software freedom philosophy guarantees users and developers the right to deploy software for any purpose, to study its source code, to make modifications as desired, and to pass both the software and modifications to others. Use, study, modify, distribute: the four guaranteed freedoms of open source.

You’ll note “price” isn’t mentioned; it’s actually OK to ask for money for open source software, so long as you don’t attempt to withhold those freedoms from people who don’t pay. As a consequence, if you’re directly distributing open source software, you need a business model that doesn’t depend on artificially enforced scarcity of the program. To focus on the price is to remain trapped in the paradigm of proprietary software.

In the early days users who focused on price often found the cost savings — based purely on skipping the up-front license fee for the software in their solution — could not be sustained or grown. That’s because the main cost of many enterprise software solutions, open or closed, is tied to sustaining ongoing value and keeping the solution humming with the help of skilled experts.

Gaining access to those experts, either by employment or by subscription, will be the main lifetime cost of the software, whether or not you paid up-front for a license. As your environment changes and you update and improve your solution, you’ll spend money for those skills. In this regard, open source helps you control how and when you spend money (and with whom) rather than marching to the beat of a vendor’s drum.

That itself proved problematic. A strict focus on the cost of entry meant that supposedly open source vendors — who made price their differentiator rather than software freedom — incrementally encroached on the four freedoms, creating the same lock-in as proprietary vendors. Many of them used tactics like dual licensing (“buy a license from us so that you don’t have to comply with the GPL“); when that failed to scare customers, they moved on to “open core” tactics where key customer features in a project are not under an open source license and don’t come with any of the essential liberties. If you as the end-user lack those four freedoms, your ability to respond to change is tied to the vendor’s whims. Incremental improvements, migration to another support provider, and exit to another solution all become costly or impossible.

The flexibility frame

True open source involves many software developers whose larger visions and plans share a common subset of software that does not differentiate them in the market. They are able to collaborate over that nondifferentiating aspect of their needs and maintain a shared commons of software source they are able to use in their own ways. The most successful projects — those with longevity and “living” code, regularly maintained and improved — can attract a changing group of diverse participants over a long period.

Projects that contribute a technical component to an overall solution, rather than attempting to embody the full solution, most often succeed by this measure. The Linux kernel, the Apache HTTPD server, and the GNOME desktop are all examples of open source used by businesses as a part of solutions without themselves forming the differentiating element of those solutions.

The trend in open source is toward this kind of component value and away from free-standing open source projects. There are a few notable free-standing projects, like the Gimp and LibreOffice, but these are exceptions rather than the rule. Even LibreOffice — now two years old and with a growing community — owes its success to the ability of multiple, commercially motivated participants to collaborate, rather than the earlier model used by OpenOffice.org, in which a single dominant vendor restricted the ability of others to participate freely.

What all these projects have in common is that their participants engage within a “flexibility frame.” Open source allows them to innovate, to leverage and complement the skills of others, and to respond to change without requiring the permission of others first. These are all features of the flexibility that open source delivers. When you can use the software and its source code for any purpose without needing to gain the permission of another party, when you can decide for yourself what problems need fixing and how to fix them, you’re liberated to lead your industry. Open innovation depends on the flexibility frame.

It’s sad that Tibco, the FRAND-demanding mobile industry, and others continue to misunderstand open source and apply the price frame to it. Apache, OpenStack, LibreOffice, and many more communities show that open source has moved on, that a flexibility frame is now more relevant. Now that it has become a default for the software industry, isn’t it time for the proprietary dinosaurs to evolve a little and catch up with the open source mammals?

This article, “Open source equals software freedom, not free software,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of the Open Sources blog and follow the latest developments in open source at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.