SCALE7x: Open source in an economic downturn

If you work with open source software, you have less to worry about in the current economic downturn, according to John Todd of Digium — the company behind the Asterisk telephony platform. Todd presented his ideas at SCALE in Los Angeles, arguing that many of the same factors that put jobs and revenue at risk in the proprietary software industry actually benefit open source projects and, by extension, provide job security for developers, implementers, and consultants who work with open source.

Businesses' motivations to adopt open source software solutions are not affected by hard economic times, Todd said: open source is often the best solution technically, and its well-understood benefits of lower total cost of ownership, flexibility, and customizability are just as real when budgets are flush as they are when budgets are lean. But decision makers focus on many of these factors in a downturn, which benefits open source. Cost becomes a life-or-death factor when the very survival of the business is on the line, he observed, while in better times companies may spend money for other reasons — to please investors, to keep up with appearances, or simply because they have the annual budget and do not want to end the year with a surplus. "Having no money, or the threat of no money, sharpens the mind about cost," Todd concluded.

Furthermore, making the best technical decision becomes more important in lean times, because the downside of being wrong is dire. And, he added, it is a well-known benefit of open source that if you choose an open source solution that turns out to be wrong, you can often code your way out of the problem, but at worst you have lost only time. With a proprietary solution, you cannot fix the problem yourself, and the vendor (under its own budget cuts) is less likely to be responsive to your requests for changes. In the end, you are out both time and money.

The slowing economy will also benefit open source in the increased availability of free resources, Todd said — first and foremost developer time. Laid-off developers continue to code in their spare time, in order to maintain their skills, learn new techniques, and simply because they enjoy it. Open source projects stand to gain from the increased pool of willing contributors along with increased availability of those who already participate in projects after-hours. Some coders leaving the proprietary world may even find jobs at companies that produce or support open source software or find roles in consulting. In addition, with businesses downsizing, surplus hardware equipment and bandwidth becomes available to be snapped up at low cost by both projects and open source companies. The hardware phenomenon happened after the dot com burst, he said, and may be repeated on an even larger scale this time due to the size of the economic recession.

Finally, Todd said, several recent developments make the timing of this recession especially good for open source to take advantage of. Unlike previous recessions, pervasive world-wide Internet, a rapidly-growing and connected open source community, and development tools that match or exceed anything available in the proprietary world are already in place. Although processors become cheaper every year, today virtualization and cloud computing make CPU cycles and storage available to anyone with zero capital expenditure. These factors benefit the open source movement more than they do proprietary companies because they are already integrated into the open source model.

Open source is not magic, Todd concluded. It is successful for well-known and well-understood reasons. But the tough economy reveals one dimension often hidden during more favorable conditions: open source is not vulnerable to the same pressures as proprietary software. No revenue stream is responsible for keeping open source code alive, but when the revenue stops, proprietary code dies. Commercial companies fire developers to cut expenses and must slow down as a result, but open source software continues to improve even when no money is coming in.

As logical as Todd's reasoning is, it was met with a small measure of skepticism from the audience. One listener challenged the assertion that layoffs would mean more spare time for developers to devote to open source coding. Aren't developers working longer hours for the same pay because of short-staffing, he asked? Todd replied that while it was true that many developers who have kept their jobs will find themselves working more hours, those hours are outweighed by the hours freed up by the developers laid off.

Todd concluded his talk by sharing some comments from Asterisk integrators and resellers, some of whom went so far as to deny that there was an economic downturn. They are statistical outliers, perhaps, but because their core business is replacing costly proprietary systems with open source alternatives, they are already "under the shield" of open source. Todd is making his entire presentation [PDF] available under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial terms, and he invites others to contribute to the discussion. Todd's underlying premise is that open source "decouples the developer and what the developer produces from economics." Whatever your opinion on the causes or the future of the current economic recession, it is hard to argue with that proposition.