What is the Major Breakthrough?

The term “open source” designates more a “process” than “free software”. The open source movement is demonstrating the viability of a market alternative to the “traditional” way to develop software. The success of the open source products mentioned above is a result of a new model of software development that depends on a cooperative effort from participants around the world. What many software project managers would have deemed a nightmare in terms of organization and ability to ensure results has turned out to produce potentially better products apparently faster and more reliably than anyone could have imagined.

The book The Success of Open Source by Steven Weber [2], does an excellent job of laying out the profound issues that open source raises in terms of sociology and political economy (see the A-HEC book review). Our take on this is that the use of open source software constitutes a commitment to participate in a collaborative community. The community structure evolves from a licensing agreement that maximizes distribution, while also encouraging participation and collaboration in a continuous development process. It is the growth of the community that results in tremendous opportunity for the participants. The opportunity is created by achieving better products from the feedback and involvement of a large user community while reducing cost through the collaboration of the extensive developer network.

This process creates products that have as their source the community, as opposed to a single vendor that one becomes dependent on. As users look to the community for support they become customers for the communities services and various members of the community emerge as providers of paid for services, such as customization, support, and even packaging. Because the community owns the intellectual property (the source code), the members can never be locked into a single vendor. In our opinion, this is truly a radical business model that will continue to challenge traditional software development.