A think tank's view of free software [LWN.net]

Back in early March, a company called the Olliance Group held a gathering of about 100 corporate manager types at a resort in California's wine country. This "Open Source think tank" has now produced a 16-page report [PDF]. It is, indeed, an interesting look at how a certain part of the corporate world views free software - though, perhaps, not entirely in the ways its authors intended.

When a self-appointed "think tank" gets together to talk about free software, one is right to be cautious. When one of that event's top-level sponsors is Microsoft, an extra degree of nervousness seems appropriate. The other top-level sponsor, naturally, is Novell; the remainder of the list is NEC, Unisys, Jasper Soft, OpenLogic, and SugarCRM. Not the most community-oriented bunch one could have come up with.

LWN readers will be glad to know that "Overall, the CIOs unanimously agreed that open source is viewed as a viable option in software procurement decisions for their companies." Once they made that admission, however, this group started to raise its complaints about open source, many of which could have come from the 1990's. The first was lack of support - evidently there still is not enough commercial support for open source software. The report notes that "this is something the open source industry will have to address to increase adoption by companies." One would think that if there is truly a need for more support these companies would see that need as a business opportunity rather than an obligation.

Another problem, it seems, is interoperability:

CIOs desire greater interoperability built directly into open source products. This is an area where proprietary solutions maintain an advantage over open source, as it is far easier to integrate and use a suite of proprietary applications that are guaranteed to interoperate and that have common interfaces that make it easier for end-users to learn and use the suite.

This is a surprising claim, given that free software developers generally work toward interoperability with everything. The next claim is just as surprising:

Open source lacks compliance with many standards when compared with proprietary solutions. These standards include universal standards such as ISO, and industry-specific standards (financial industry standards, health care industry standards, etc.). It was acknowledged however, that open source offers some advantages in the area of technology standards through its openness and transparency and its ability to facilitate the creation of de facto standards such as Eclipse and ODF.

The description of OpenDocument as a "de facto standard" borders on the dishonest. The various reasons why certain "industry standards" may not be supported as well as others are not examined.

Think tank attendees bemoaned the fact that monetizing open source remains challenging. Then, there is this problem:

Open source generally depends on a corps of motivated volunteer developers to develop features. Often, the features that developers are interested in working on are different then features that customers are requesting. For example, Openoffice customers want more Visual Basic macros to ensure interoperability with Microsoft Office, but OO developers have not been all that interested in building VB macros.

The idea that a company whose business model depends on better VB support could devote resources to the creation of that support is not mentioned anywhere in the report.

Licensing is an issue which is mentioned several times in the report:

Open source licensing is a big source of confusion due to the number of open source licenses, and a lack of understanding on how licenses impact business, as well as how licenses interact with one another. Some licenses require technology to be shared with the community, other licenses require attribution, and numerous licenses have different ways of dealing with software patents. Furthermore, many licenses are incompatible. License proliferation, confusion and incompatibility are barriers to the continued growth and adoption of open source.

Clearly, we would be better off with the simplicity, compatibility, and fairness found in proprietary software licenses. Beyond that:

Think Tank participants bemoaned the lack of a business-friendly license that adequately addresses issues such as copyright, patents, attribution and indemnification. While nobody was suggesting "yet another license" as the solution, the dissatisfaction by commercial vendors and customers with the existing licenses was clear.

It would be most enlightening to see what this "business-friendly license" would involve, but the attendees apparently ran out of time before they could elaborate on that point.

The GPLv3 draft was also discussed, with a generally negative response.

Another problem:

These issues also point to the need for better governance of open source contributions. Currently, projects have many different standards governing code contributions - some communities vet the code, some require contribution agreements to be signed and others have no such requirements. The lack of standards and governance on contributions raises concerns on the source and legitimacy of code that is incorporated into projects.

This is a claim that needs to be backed up: despite the intense attention which has been given to the provenance of code in a number of high-profile projects, the number of real problems has been exceedingly small. If the attendees of this think tank wish to claim that the code found in free software projects is less likely to be legitimate than proprietary code, they need to come up with some evidence to that effect. Sadly, space constraints appear to have prevented this evidence from being included in the report.

Other worries include a lack of open source developers - their numbers are not keeping up with the growth of the industry. The fact that quite a few developers are coming out of universities is considered to be a good thing, but not without reservations: "However a concern was expressed that due to the popularity of open source development at universities, graduates may be lacking key skills such as sound architecture, defining customer needs and product management." We also hear that open source "tends to fragment easily," presenting problems for vendors. "Commercial open source tends to be less fragmented, while 'pure' open source tends to be more fragmented."

All is not bad, though. Open source offers "flexibility in procurement" and "flexibility in deployment" where "companies can mix and match open source software as they please" - despite all of those interoperability and standards compliance problems we heard about earlier. Faster product cycles are seen to be good, as are faster bug fixes. Plus:

In addition, there is "perceived" value in the ability to fix or enhance open source code at the CIOs pleasure even if the vast majority of user organizations do not .

This "perceived" value is as close as this report ever gets to any sort of freedom-related issue.

There is plenty more to look at in this report, but perhaps it is best to finish with this observation:

Finally, OSS and proprietary models continue to converge. Proprietary companies are taking elements of the open source model, including faster development cycles, and free, downloadable trial versions. OSS companies are taking elements of the proprietary model, by offering support, updates and indemnification.

This report gives no space to the developers of all this software, beyond complaining that both their numbers and their motivation to implement Visual Basic macros are insufficient. There is no thought toward maintaining healthy development and user communities, addressing problematic legal issues, or contributing back to the community in any way. These are people who see free software as a well from which they can draw resources for their businesses, but that software is just a raw material. They want to repackage and sell that material in as proprietary a manner as possible.

If this group represents the future of the open source business community, we could be in real trouble. A look at the list of sponsors given at the top of this article is cause for comfort, however, as most of the companies which have found real success with free software chose not to support this event. So there is reason to believe that this "think tank" is not representative of the wider business community, that, instead, it's a group of leaders of businesses who wish they were doing better at "monetizing" free software.

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