https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1504/S00125/how-open-source-grew-up.htm
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How open source grew up |
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In the late 1990s and early 2000s I worked for Australian Linux Today. At that time open source was a vibrant, yet immature, market.
Visiting the Open Source Open Society 2015 conference in Wellington this week was like watching someone else’s child who you knew as a smart but awkward teenager, transformed into a smart, professional adult.
Open source grew up.
The IT market was still moving away from a model where servers came with an expensive to buy and expensive to support operating system linked to the hardware maker.
Some of those OSes were fully proprietary. Others were versions of Unix although they often had proprietary branding and non-open components.
Much of my writing centred on asking how people and companies could make a living from the new model. We all knew that money could be made from selling services, but that didn’t look like enough revenue to sustain technology companies and jobs.[1]
So the open source crowd spent a lot of
time trying to create related products, usually apps, that
they could charge money for.
In one sense the PC open source explosion never happened. In part that was because Microsoft changed tack to see off the threat. Among other things the price of desktop apps fell. The commercial software developers bundled more value into their products and attempted to shorten the time between releases.
Most of all, they had to sharpen their act. That
meant creating cleaner, more robust applications. It was
about this time the overall reliability of everything PC
related switched from not-really-acceptable to not-all-that
bad.[2]
That last sentence would have enraged the open source community in 2000. Today there’s very little of that kind of sensitivity.
And
anyway, Apple’s OS X is, like Linux, a Unix operating
system. Large parts of OS X are open
source.
Even Microsoft and Windows have embraced open source ideas in many ways since 2000.
Sure,
it’s not perfect. There are question marks, but while open
source never won a pitched battle against proprietary
software to conquer the PC desktop, open source DNA is
everywhere you look.
Open source companies make money from wrapping services around free software. It’s not as much money as selling popular proprietary software. Services don’t scale as quickly as a runaway hit app.
Selling services doesn’t subsidise as many
overblown long lunches. Nor does it require as many
well-paid sales people. On the other hand, because many
services are charged by the hour, it does mean plenty of
good jobs for people with the right skills.