The war is over. It is time to go round and bayonet the wounded.

What am I talking about?

I’m talking about the legitimacy of Open Source. There was a war in the IT industry between the Open Source fan boys and those who believed that Open Source was a plague on the legitimate business model of selling licensed software. And it is – if by “plague” you mean “challenge.” The war is over. The Open Source guys won.

The Politics of Open Source

The problem with politics is that it gets in the way of rational discussion and rational conclusions. Politicians cheat. I’m not just talking about the politicians you happen to dislike, I’m talking about them all. There may be a few honest politicians, but the political honesty gene is rare. Most politicians are cheer-leaders for a specific political posture, idea or movement and they’ll happily tie the facts in knots  and invent bizarre slogans in order to support it.

Some of the supporters of Open Source are just raucous politicians with a very definite agenda. Open Source is good because it’s right. Power to the GPL. Software wants to be free, like music and movies. Infinite goods. Blah, blah, blah.

Back To First Principles: The Problems of Closed Source

There is a problem with closed source and it’s simply this. You have no idea what it’s doing or how it is doing it. That’s fine if you trust it, accept its limitations and don’t want to interface with it, but otherwise it’s not so fine.

Let’s take this piece by piece:

1. Trust. With Open Source nothing is hiding. If the code was stolen then the rightful owner can identify the fact. If the code is closed there is a risk. So there’s a trust issue. You might trust the vendor of closed code, but you don’t have to trust the provider of Open Source as much. Oh and you can also see what it’s doing so you know can find out whether its messing anything up.
2. Limitations. Some software does exactly what you want and you don’t care to change it. Some does not and you’d like to change it, even if only in a small way. I use a fair amount of WordPress-based code, including plug-ins and themes and I make changes. I would never use the software if I couldn’t do that.
3. Interfaces. Finally we need to consider interfacing. In truth, this is the whole point of this posting.  In the end it’s all about the ecosystem that can be generated around a given Open Source component or set of components. If you make the interface to the software available it also makes sense for the source code to be available.

Open Source resolves all these issues and as long as it fulfills your application need, it is much preferable to closed source. This is not about cost. Open Source products are not all free and we shouldn’t expect them to be. Software doesn’t write itself. However having the source open is an important feature in many instances and sometimes it’s a must-have feature.

For example, I wouldn’t accept any WordPress plugin if I didn’t get the source code. It starts to become really important when you encounter shoddy programming. If you have the source code you can support the software yourself – rewrite it even and you may well prefer to. And, of course, you can pick up support if the original developer is hit by the proverbial bus.

Open Source Today

Having given the rational argument, lets now simply examine the evidence that Open Source has acquired true respectability.

There are many successful Open Source products; too many to list; so many that just about every software application you can think of has an Open Source alternative. There are over 300,000 Open Source projects listed on SourceForge, some of which are defunct and some of which are trivial, but many are active and support well established and widely used products.

There are many important companies that devote man years of time to writing Open Source code. There is, of course, Mozilla (with FireFox) and Red Hat both of whom base their whole business on Open Source. But there are many others. Sun Microsystems (soon to be Oracle) has given massive support to Open Source. It owns the most popular database in the world; the open source MySQL. It has Open Sourced the whole of Solaris and much of Java and it also is the custodian of Open Office the popular Open Source office application. Add it all up and it amounts to tens of millions of lines of Open Source.

IBM’s contribution to Open Source is almost as great with 12.5 million lines of code contributed to Eclipse and a great deal of code contributed to Linux, Apache, Geronimo and other important Open Source efforts. Intel has written its own version of Linux called Moblin, which it recently donated to the Linux Foundation. And then there’s Google with Android (its own version of Linux), the Chrome browser and other incidental Open Source products. Google even provides a Open Source project hosting capability that rivals Sourceforge in size.

Even Apple, which majors in proprietary software, has learned to coexist with Open Source. Beneath Apple’s excellent OS X sits Darwin, the core operating system which is fully Open Sourced. Darwin integrates the Mach 3.0 kernel based on version 4.4 of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) Unix.

Nowadays the only real bitter-end opponent of Open Source is Microsoft. Pretty much everyone else has found a way to accommodate it within its business model. Microsoft occasionally makes gestures, such as its recent plan to fund The CodePlex Foundation – a not-for-profit extension of its CodePlex web site. But it has too much to lose to really bite the bullet.

But so what? The war is over. Open Source won. The whole IT industry now depends on a vast amount of Open Source code and many key Open Source projects.