Many a software in this day and age receives regular patches. Whether it is for minor stability fixes or additional features, it is not uncommon to be asked to update your product before using it. Some may argue that this is due to lazy/rushed programming before launch, which is partially true in some cases, but not for the majority of updates. I get updates for iTunes maybe every other week, but it’s usually for something minor, like stability fixes or security patches, but would that really be considered lazy if something can only be found by crowdsourcing the stress testing? Or something like Discord, with updates that bring very welcome features that could not exist at launch, coming from such a small company. While software used to come as it was ~20 years ago, continual updates are how the system works now.
And that is one of the reasons open source is essential in the business sense. Software cannot be made one-and-done anymore, there requires constant review of the software and constant fixes to that code for something to compete. Businesses can utilize open source for the free software, of course, but they can also operate ON that free software, producing open source programs for people to use. That may not make sense, since there’s no guaranteed profit, but let’s study Mozilla.
Mozilla makes a free web browser, Mozilla FireFox, on top of plenty of other products, such as ThunderBird and SeaMonkey. They understand the value of open source by making all of their products open source, and they have created the #4 most popular web browser today and generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year. But they do this by way of royalties with other web corporations that rely on FireFox to distribute their content and set their services as the default, such as Google and Yahoo.
That’s on the corporate side of things, but what about the development? Since everything is open source, most of the development is handled by users that donate their time and skills to fix issues and help implement patches in a timely manner. There are Mozilla employees that aid in this as well, but they do it in tandem with the open source community. This allows the company to operate at a much larger scale by having more hands on the code. These developers volunteer often because Mozilla stands for their values, i.e. the open source community.
On top of the royalties, Mozilla makes money off of donations, whether that comes from money directly or things like merchandising, which honestly only makes the loyalty towards the brand even stronger.
Just one more brief examples is encyclopedias. Those book sets used to be common to see, whether in a library or somebody’s personal study (not so common). But once people understood the Internet, Wikipedia came and made these sets obsolete. This was in part of the ease of use, but also how fast information was being added by crowd sourcing the labor. A print encyclopedia can be obsolete the day it is printed, but Wikipedia allows for instant updates. However, encyclopedia companies have transitioned to the Internet, but their services are held in less regard because they were too late and they rely on different systems of funding (ads vs. Wikipedia’s donation drives).
The open source business model is a broken system that can easily be exploited, but it’s not unruly. People will give money to products they believe in, and there is value in being a popular product. Whether that’s just a means of selling user data or ad space, it’s definitely sustainable. And the “contract” work from the open source community allows for up to date products and user satisfaction.
ESR claims the open-source approach prevents a business from “getting rent from the secret bits”, but I think that’s a dated way of viewing open source. While there is benefit from having something your competitors don’t have, there’s also benefit in having free workers making a product they can safely enjoy under the directive vision of the corporation. It is not for every company – EA is not going to adopt the open source approach in their video games – but companies that can utilize it, like IBM, recognize how important open-source is and how it will influence the future of technology. I look forward to see how IBM helps grow Red Hat and how IBM grows with it. It’s certainly a good time to work for Big Blue.