What is Open Source?

Article originally from a 2014 issue of Ethical Consumer Magazine.

Open source enthusiast Nic Wistreich tells us what this often misunderstood software movement is all about.

Open source is one of those phrases that gets thrown around, from the Cabinet Office now asking for it in government ICT contracts, to cyber-libertarians saying it heralds the start of a post-capitalist age. But what does it actually mean? And given how much of the for-profit digital world depends on open source – from Android phones to the Safari browser, Facebook’s servers to YouTube’s interface – is it another example of an economy wanting something for nothing?

In simple terms, an open source License allows people to view, modify, copy and share computer code (which powers software and websites), usually without restriction. To understand what that means in practice, it’s helpful to use five analogies:

Transparency: a car.
An open source license is like having the right to lift your car bonnet to view the engine. If you use software but can’t see what it’s doing behind the scenes, then it’s impossible to know what it’s doing with your data or even if it’s secure. By making code viewable by all, it’s much easier to spot and fix security flaws and bugs, which is why many security standards, such as password encryption, are open source.

Modification: a house
Open source is like buying a house and being free to decorate it however you want, to build extensions or demolish walls. Closed-source software strictly limits what you can do with it.

Accumulative: DNA:
Like a genome that keeps evolving, or the way academia builds upon prior knowledge, open source is a way of ‘standing on the shoulder of giants’, by building on what exists, rather than starting from scratch. This applies to everything from the code at the heart of software and powering websites to design elements, which can develop in an accumulative way, with anyone free to improve on the work of those previously.

Collaborative: a coop
Like a co-op, but without membership. While code authors may still own copyright on their code, by providing an open license, assets are kept public and the user community can offer improvements, fixes, language translations, design improvements, documentation and so on. Eric S Raymond describes open source development as “a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles”.

Democratic: a landslide
Like a democracy where anyone can set up their own country if they don’t like the leader. Open source projects have core maintainers who have the final say over suggestions and contributions from the user community but if they aren’t responsive, people can ‘fork’ the software and build their own ‘branch’. The content management system Joomla, for instance, was forked from Mambo, after its corporate owners started charging developers big fees.

Beyond idealism?

For the non-profit, co-op or social enterprise sectors these principles dovetail with many values, and offer advantages. For the profit world, however, open source’s freedom around intellectual property has created much debate about its strengths and weaknesses. Critics – and some companies whose models are threatened – have said open source projects offer worse support and less-developed user interfaces and documentation. In reality there’s a big range in quality and business models and some have been hugely successful.

Take the content system WordPress, which powers 23% of the world’s websites and made $45m in 2012 or Mozilla Foundation, which produces the Firefox web browser, and turned over $311m in 2012. Or Wikipedia, the fifth-ranking internet company by visits globally, where the ability for anyone to contribute is perhaps both its great strength and weakness.

What needs to be remembered, as the creator of the main open source license Richard Stallman says, is that it’s freedom as in ‘free speech’, but not necessarily ‘free lunch’. Some open source companies turn over hundreds of millions a year, and charge thousands for a user-license and support, while others depend on donations and goodwill. The community has depended on new business models, from crowdfunding (which helped build Facebook alternative Diaspora) to licensing features such as the way Mozilla Firefox sells their default search box to Google.

Perhaps the most interesting part about open source is the contradiction woven into it’s heart, where it can be viewed as the idealogical end-point of both communism and of liberalism: it’s both anti-private-property and anti-centralisation, yet it powers the hugely profitable (and monopolistic) digital economy. Either because of swimming against the current of free market capitalism – or in spite of – it’s proven remarkably successful at getting disparate groups of people who’ve often never met to collaborate on building something that no-one fully owns, but that frequently solves technical and engineering problems better than either the market or the state. And for that alone it deserves some attention.

Nic Wistreich is a web designer and open source enthusiast. He also wrote a chapter in the Ethical Consumer/New Internationalist book People Over Captial.