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I've argued that various items hold back the FOSS movement: 1) FOSS' inability to recognize and address its shortcomings, 2) the Free Software Foundation, and now 3) the limited potential of FOSS.
Earlier, I commented on a study by Prof Ronald Mann that addressed the industrial effects of proliferation in FOSS technologies: ...small firms will be unable to leverage open source business models for gain because of their limited ability to adequately control different parts of their value chain; those best posed to succeed with open source are comparatively large service like IBM and Red Hat. Smaller firms have limited ability to ensure continuing service support and assure customers against legal uncertainty. An implication of this argument is that the market for pure, stand-alone FOSS firms will be concentrated in a few large players, a stark contrast to the general technology sector with its prominence of small-medium sized firms.
So what about all the other FOSS organizations, the ones representing the revolution, what about all the volunteer developers who choose to contribute to projects other than those with firms like Red Hat? What about the notion that FOSS represents a more decentralized, and thus, more innovative development-business model than proprietary organizations?
Well, according to FOSS citizen Roy Russo, it looks like FOSS firms cannot play nicely with each other because of the very factors that purportedly lend to the advantages it touts in competition with proprietary firms: The main benefits... of adopting an OSS business model are: a/ disruption and b/ commoditization. I believe much of the OSS vs. OSS competition we see is based on fear; the fear of not being able to compete with an equally disruptive force, and losing control of the rate of commoditization in the space...
...an OSS competitor armed with the same tools as you, can wreak havoc on a market, leading to the “race to the bottom” effect - where markets are commoditized to the point of meager profits. Hence, the goal of most OSS companies is to control the rate of a/ disruption and b/ commoditization - control those rates, and you control your market share and revenue growth... The result of FOSS on FOSS competition may be exactly what Prof Mann anticipated. The more FOSS matures, the more it resembles characteristics in the traditional proprietary sector that FOSS proponents decry as stifling of FOSS innovation today:OSS companies focusing on the proprietary competition win-out in the end, but if history is a guide, they also manage to squash their own OSS competitors by doing so.
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I’ve always wondered if OSS business models by their very nature lead to monopolies and maybe oligopolies. I’d love to hear examples where they don’t... The next phase in FOSS maturity may find its proponents split on whether FOSS should grow at all, or stay in its current stages to avoid turning into the kind of commercial-market phenomon the FOSS movement has long opposed.
Update: FOSS community citizen, Dana Blankenhorn, comments on Roy Russo's article- I am constantly amused at how people try to apply the metrics of proprietary software to open source.
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...open source, by its nature, changes a lot of rules. It changes the nature of competition, the nature of acquisition. It does not overthrow these rules, it twists them into new forms.
Be alert to the changes, and don’t assume the old rules apply in the exact same way to the new world. Hmmm. Economic measurement applies to all industries and all kinds of technologies. If the FOSS community has better standards with which to gauge FOSS business and development, besides ones reflecting delusions of grandeur, they should present them. If not, FOSS proponents should accept that FOSS is not too groundbreaking, nor radical and absolutely not revolutionary. FOSS should learn something from standard economic measurement, rather than trying to be an exception to it.
posted by Noel Le @ 7:48 AM | Free Culture Movement
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