The Virtues and Evils of Open Source

Yes, I know, I’ve been behind lately. A ton of very inter­est­ing things to catch up on. But I’d like to put in one quick note about open source code. I recently came across an art­icle, writ­ten last year by a law­yer, gen­er­ally advising devel­op­ment com­pan­ies not to use open source. I don’t quite recall where it was (if I did I’d link to it) but I do remem­ber it being quite clear in stat­ing that using open source is A Bad Thing and to avoid it alto­gether — not just to be care­ful, but rather to treat it as one would radio­act­ive waste.

With respect, I don’t quite agree. I cer­tainly advise my cli­ents to take a great deal of cau­tion in using open source code, par­tic­u­larly the GPL vari­ety, and very par­tic­u­larly if they have a desire to keep some or all of their own secret, pro­pri­et­ary code secret and pro­pri­et­ary. That being said, I do have many, many cli­ents who have used open source code to great advant­age in vari­ous ways. Some have simply used exist­ing open source code to avoid rein­vent­ing the wheel (and sav­ing on costs), while tak­ing care to keep viral ele­ments out of their pro­pri­et­ary code. Oth­ers have been more aggress­ive with the open source model and have inten­tion­ally decided to use open source as the basis for their busi­ness model and mak­ing their very own code, or parts of it, either open source or sub­ject to a dual–licens­ing model. As the Red Hats, JBosses, Sleepycats, MySQLs etc. etc. of the world have demon­strated, you can go open source and still have a pretty viable busi­ness. And, of course, there are the “old world” com­pan­ies like IBM who have decided to go open source (in some lim­ited ways — e.g. IBM’s DB2 Express-C thing).

Of course, this is not to sug­gest that any­one through cau­tion to the wind and just start pulling down stuff from Source­forge and whack­ing it into your product. Use of open source def­in­itely requires some plan­ning ahead and con­sid­er­a­tion of what the busi­ness model and value pro­pos­i­tion of your busi­ness will be. Optim­ally, enlist the help of a law­yer who’s famil­iar with open source licenses to dis­cuss what you plan to do and the pack­ages you plan to use. Or, if that’s not feas­ible, try at least to read the applic­able licenses your­self and ensure you com­ply with them, because if you don’t think that any­one will notice, or that no one will actu­ally sue you, you may want to pay a visit to the GPL Viol­a­tions Site and recon­sider, in addi­tion to the ques­tions that will be asked of you when the due dili­gence starts on your next round of fin­an­cing or, even worse, your (abor­ted) exit event. Can badly man­aged open source usage (and I emphas­ize badly man­aged, not simply open source usage) kill a deal? Definitely.

In short — I don’t think open source is neces­sar­ily a bad thing. In fact, it can be a pretty good thing, not just in the social good sense and all that, but also as a busi­ness. But it need to be used tak­ing into account its terms of use and ensur­ing that its con­sist­ent with the strategy you plan to take.

If per­haps there’s one thing I’d recom­mend it would be for shops to make abso­lutely sure they have a dis­cip­lined approach in track­ing where code comes from and the terms under which its being used and why its being used. That applies not only to open source stuff, but also, for example, your pro­gram­mers tak­ing neat snip­pets of code from Dr. Dobbs or some­thing else, or com­ing across a nice little script some­where on the Web and say­ing “Gee, that’s neat, let’s use it in our product”.

Any­way, if I remem­ber where the art­icle was I’ll update this to include a link.

related:

1. The Vir­tues and Evils of Open Source  —  Part II
2. google open sourcing vp8 codec
3. Microsoft Pat­ents RSS. Or Tries To. Maybe.
4. it.can present­a­tion on open source
5. open source and copyright