Can Open Source Drive Sustainable Innovation?
One innovation is easy. But sustainable innovation — building lots of worthwhile new things again and again, even as you maintain your old products — is challenging. The VAR Guy wonders: Is open source the key to sustainable tech innovation? Is open source the best way to keep a maturing company feeling vibrant and young? Before you answer, consider some of these scenarios.
The VAR Guy built this site entirely on open source software (of course, he paid some talented developers to piece it all together). And during the first few months of business, our resident blogger had ample time to test new open source components for this site.
But then something wonderful — and disturbing — happened. This “fun” site turned into a business. Our blogger actually had to blog (no stop!) for his loyal readers. It’s as if he shifted from innovation mode, to maintenance mode.
Still, open source seems to be the best way to keep on innovating. Especially for a small business. By skipping a few hours of sleep, The VAR Guy can test open source code from developers across the globe. Like a kid snapping together a new set of LEGOS, our resident blogger keeps finding (and testing) new building blocks. Best of all, he relies on the work of strangers from far off lands who don’t demand any money.
In stark contrast, companies like Microsoft have to keep hiring developers, debugging legacy code, and apologizing for less-than-stellar products. Clearly, the open source model beats closed source for ongoing innovations.
Rare Fruit
Or does it? How do you explain a company like Apple — the apparent king of sustainable innovation. Just when you warm up to your iPod, along comes the iPhone and now the iPhone 3G. As you brag about your MacBook Pro, along comes the MacBook Air.
How does Apple out-innovate the entire Wintel industry — Microsoft, Intel, Dell, HP, Lenovo — and so on? And how does Apple stay ahead of open source on many fronts?
Sure, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth says he sees the day when Linux will be more intuitive than Mac OS. Frankly, The VAR Guy doesn’t see that day coming anytime soon.
When it comes to sustainable innovation, the open source model seems to have just about everyone beat. Everyone, that is, except Apple.
Hi,
I was just going through the site, and I found the article absorbing but I don’t know what exactly you mean by open source?
Can you please explain.
Priyanka: Is your name coded for “prank”? If your question was sincere, The VAR Guy apologizes and directs you to this definition of open source.
There is tons of innovation in open source. The perceived lack of it comes from a combination of things:
1. The fact that people confuse innovation with flashy features and big marketing.
2. The fact that most people always look at open source software in comparison to proprietary counterparts and only focus on how well the FOSS version stacks up as a “free replacement”. As such, they limit their experience with the FOSS product to the subset that already exists in the proprietary.
3. The circumstantial aspect that the open source development community is in the minority and therefore playing “catch up” to stay compatible with proprietary software. If FOSS was the dominant model, or if open standards were followed, the developers wouldn’t have to waste time staying compatible with proprietary moving targets.
4. 90% of everything is crap, and people cherry-pick to load their arguments.
@Alan: I think open source drives innovation because as Web media company, I’m able to “leverage” the open source work of others and adjust it to my own needs quickly. So you never really have to start from scratch. The building blocks are out there, and new building blocks always seem to pop up just when you need them.
I agree Joe; and I’ll add that when companies are basing products on open source, their innovations are their only individual selling points — so they *must* innovate. You can’t simply (as proprietary companies often do now) lock people in to a commodity product by being the only one who is legally able to be compatible. In other words, you can’t rest on your laurels.
Alan: Funny you should mention that open source folks can’t “rest on their laurels.”
I just got off the phone with a Red Hat channel VP. (Stay tuned for a blog entry Thursday). During the conversation, he mentioned that the annual subscription model forces Red Hat to innovate and earn customers’ business every year.
We take a similar approach with Nine Lives Media Inc. (The VAR Guy’s parent company). Innovate or die, and open source helps us do it.
quote: Mark Shuttleworth says he sees the day when Linux will be more intuitive than Mac OS.
Linux is already more intuitive than Mac OS.
Come to Felton, CA and help recruit more people to be innovative.
http://www.lindependence.net/
@tracyanne: Linux is intuitive, but MacOS feels more polished. The VAR Guy runs both every day.
So, can you see the day when Linux will be more polished than MacOS X?
It is easy, just polish your Linux now. It is easy.
@Marcos: The good news – yes, individuals can polish Linux on their own. The bad news – most consumers don’t want to polish their operating systems.
Umm… speaking of Mac. MacOS is now based on FreeBSD, which is also an open-source licensed product, albeit not a (IMHO) very good one, as it allows folks like Apple and Microsoft to leech off others’ innovations while not returning anything to the project.
@Dennis: Your point leads to another interesting topic. People often say Microsoft will never, ever port Office to Linux. Generally speaking, I agree. But isn’t Office for Mac OS essentially a Linux/Unix suite?
And maybe Mark means that he is going to polish it for those customers. He can even see the day, maybe it is on his schedule.
I’m happy that he can see it. I just hope it is not a mirage.
Ok Completely missed it most of open source innovation does not come in the innovation stage but maintaining. Its call the Itch and scratching it development model. From time to time a maintainer will find them a piece short not acquirable from anyone else. So maintainer adds that feature if it goes back to open source it will travel around for a while until another maintainer sees it and says it can expanded improved and so on fix there Itch so the process goes into a never ending loop.
So innovation is not something people in Open source go looking for it normally happens thew a set of small changes until one day it is like wow that great way better than anything else and so innovate someone had to be really innovative to create that. Sorry no. Could have been the collective mind of millions.
I believe that open source will remain innovative as long as there is something better out there. As soon as the GPL dominates everything, innovation will come to a screeching halt. As passionate as Richard Stallman may be, open source software *needs* proprietary software to motivate it.
There is no doubt that the open source method drives innovation, and I completely disagree with badger101101. Just off the top of my head, the “Live CD”/OS-on-a-stick concept, the plug-in/extension to software concept, the wiki, the OLPC “open mesh” networking concept, etc, etc – these concepts were developed thanks to the open source method. These concepts, although highly beneficial and successful, are an anathema to the proprietary method and couldn’t have been developed that way at all. I look forward to the new inventions driven by open source – I’m sure they will be plenty.
Closed source is about maximising profits while open source is about minimising costs. Thus, closed source is a product while open source is a production means. At this level there is no superiority of either paradigm, and it can be argued that some software is more like a product while other is more like a tool and thus stands to benefit more from the open source approach.
From a business point of view it should probably be as difficult to become a major player on a new field using either closed source or open source. However, two things happen. With closed source, the binary application is the product itself, while with open source, the software is merely a tool for/component of the supplied product/service (as is the case with this site).
More importantly, once a company has become the dominant supplier (roughly, a monopoly) on a market segment, it is much easier to maintain both market share and high profit margins and thus the incentive to innovate diminishes or is even reversed (consider Internet Explorer after Netscape and before Firefox). This is because the inherently temporary technological monopoly it enjoyes as the result of its original innovation becomes a legal monopoly under IP law, while the cost of entering in a competition with an open source-based company is by definition low, as all their technological advances can be reused by anyone else.
Thus, open source companies find it easier to play catch-up, are more customer friendly, more challenging for their management and staff, but have a much harder time making into the billionaires’ club.
When it comes to innovation as such, think what would have happened should the wheel technology or the bread recipe been “closed source”. Or even what if the technology of mirror manufacturing were not “stolen” from the Venice companies (by hiring and smuggling out the engineers) by Louis XIV.
Historically, knowledge – including algorithms – was best developed by sharing advances either freely or through espionage/robbery. While sitting on knowledge has been very useful for some (e.g. mirrors, silk worms, IBM PCs) the eventual spread of these technological advance has proven more beneficial overall and has generated a lot of additional innovation. Actually the spread of knowledge, rather than the mere spread of genes has been the foundation for the quick pace of the human evolution.
CORRECTION:
“More importantly, once a CLOSED SOURCE company has become the dominant supplier (roughly, a monopoly) on a market segment, it is much easier to maintain both market share and high profit margins…”
Pardon me.
Where did you get that image of the man with the light bulb?