So you want to compete with or replace open source July 16, 2024 on Drew DeVault's blog

We are living through an interesting moment in source-available software.¹ The open source movement has always had, and continues to have, a solid grounding in grassroots programmers building tools for themselves and forming communities around them. Some looming giants brought on large sums of money – Linux, Mozilla, Apache, and so on – and other giants made do without, like GNU, but for the most part if anyone thought about open source 15 years ago they were mostly thinking about grassroots communities who built software together for fun. With the rise of GitHub and in particular the explosion of web development as an open platform, commercial stakeholders in software caught on to the compelling economics of open source. The open source boom that followed caused open source software to have an enormous impact on everyone working in the software industry, and, in one way or another, on everyone living on planet Earth.

Over the past decade or so, a lot of businesses, particularly startups, saw these economics unfolding in front of them and wanted to get in on this boom. A lot of talented developers started working on open source software with an explicit aim towards capitalizing on it, founding businesses and securing capital investments to build their product – an open source product. A few years following the onset of these startups, the catch started to become apparent. While open source was proven to be incredibly profitable and profoundly useful for the software industry as a whole, the economics of making open source work for one business are much different.

It comes down to the fact that the free and open source software movements are built on collaboration, and all of our success is attributable to this foundation. The economics that drew commercial interest into the movement work specifically because of this collaboration – because the FOSS model allows businesses to share R&D costs and bring together talent across corporate borders into a great melting pot of innovation. And, yes, there is no small amount of exploitation going on as well; businesses are pleased to take advantage of the work of Jane Doe in Ohio’s FOSS project to make themselves money without sharing any of it back. Nevertheless, the revolutionary economics of FOSS are based on collaboration, and are incompatible with competition.

The simple truth of open source is that if you design your business model with an eye towards competition, in which you are the only entity who can exclusively monetize the software product, you must eschew the collaborative aspects of open source – and thus its greatest strength. Collaboration in open source works because the collaborators, all representatives of different institutions, are incentivized to work together for mutual profit. No one is incentivized to work for you, for free, for your own exclusive profit.

More than a few of these open source startups were understandably put out when this reality started to set in. It turns out the market capitalization of a business that has an open source product was often smaller than the investments they had brought in. Under these conditions it’s difficult to give the investors the one and only thing they demand – a return on investment. The unbounded growth demanded by the tech boom is even less likely to be attainable in open source. There are, to be entirely clear, many business models which are compatible with open source. But there are also many which are not. There are many open source projects which can support a thriving business or even a thriving sub-industry, but there are some ideas which, when placed in an open source framing, simply cannot be capitalized on as effectively, or often at all.

Open source ate a lot of lunches. There are some kinds of software which you just can’t make in a classic silicon valley startup fashion anymore. Say you want to write a database server – a sector which has suffered a number of rug-pulls from startups previously committed to open source. If you make it closed source, you can’t easily sell it like you could 10 or 20 years ago, ala MSSQL. This probably won’t work. If you make it open source, no one will pay you for it and you’ll end up moaning about how the major cloud providers are “stealing” your work. The best way to fund the development of something like that is with a coalition of commercial stakeholders co-sponsoring or co-maintaining the project in their respective self-interests, which is how projects like PostgreSQL, Mesa, or the Linux kernel attract substantial paid development resources. But it doesn’t really work as a startup anymore.

Faced with these facts, there have been some challenges to the free and open source model coming up in the past few years, some of which are getting organized and starting to make serious moves. Bruce Perens, one of the founding figures of the Open Source Initiative, is working on the “post-open” project; “Fair Source” is another up-and-coming-effort, and there have been and will be others besides.

What these efforts generally have in common is a desire to change the commercial dynamic of source-available software. In other words, the movers and shakers in these movements want to get paid more, or more charitably, want to start a movement in which programmers that work on source-available software as a broader class get paid more. The other trait they have in common is a view that the open source definition and the four freedoms of free software do not sufficiently provide for this goal.

For my part, I don’t think that this will work. I think that the aim of sole or limited rights to monetization and the desire to foster a collaborative environment are irreconcilable. These movements want to have both, and I simply don’t think that’s possible.

This logic is rooted in a deeper notion of ownership over the software, which is both subtle and very important. This is a kind of auteur theory of software. The notion is that the software they build belongs to them. They possess a sense of ownership over the software, which comes with a set of moral and perhaps legal rights to the software, which, importantly, are withheld from any entity other than themselves. The “developers” enjoy this special relationship with the project – the “developers” being the special class of person entitled to this sense of ownership and the class to whom the up-and-coming source-available movements make an appeal, in the sense of “pay the developers” – and third-party entities who work on the source code are merely “contributors”, though they apply the same skills and labor to the project as the “developers” do. The very distinction between “first-party” and “third-party” developers is contingent on this “auteur” worldview.

This is quite different from how most open source projects have found their wins. If Linux can be said to belong to anyone, it belongs to everyone. It is for this reason that it is in everyone’s interests to collaborate on the project. If it belonged to someone or some entity alone, especially if that sense of ownership is rooted in justifying that entity’s sole right to effectively capitalize on the software, the dynamic breaks down and the incentive for the “third-party” class to participate is gone. It doesn’t work.

That said, clearly the proponents of these new source-available movements feel otherwise. And, to be clear, I wish them well. I respect the right for authors of software to distribute it under whatever terms they wish.² And, for my part, I do believe that source-available is a clear improvement over proprietary software, even though these models fall short of what I perceive as the advantages of open source. However, for these movements to have a shot at success, they need to deeply understand these dynamics and the philosophical and practical underpinnings of the free and open source movements.

However, it is very important to me that we do not muddy the landscape of open source by trying to reform, redefine, or expand our understanding of open source to include movements which contradict this philosophy. My well-wishes are contingent on any movements which aim to compete with open source stopping short of calling themselves open source. This is something I appreciate about the fair source and post-open movements – both movements explicitly disavow the label of open source. If you want to build something new, be clear that it is something new – this is the ground rule.

So you want to compete with open source, or even replace it with something new. Again, I wish you good luck. But this question will be at the heart of your challenge: will you be able to assume the mantle of the auteur and capitalize on this software while still retaining the advantages that made open source successful? Will you be able to appeal to the public in the same way open source does while holding onto these commercial advantages for yourself? Finding a way to answer this question with a “yes” is the task laid before you. It will be difficult; in the end, you will have to give something to the public to get something in return. Simply saying that the software itself is a gift equal to the labor you ask of the public is probably not going to work, especially when this “gift” comes with monetary strings attached.

As for me, I still believe in open source, and even in the commercial potential of open source. It requires creativity and a clever business acumen to identify and exploit market opportunities within this collaborative framework. To win in open source you must embrace this collaboration and embrace the fact that you will share the commercial market for the software with other entities. If you’re up to that challenge, then let’s keep beating the open source drum together. If not, these new movements may be a home for you – but know that a lot of hard work still lies ahead of you in that path.