Open source roundtable: Bruce Perens

Open source leader views software patenting as the No. 1 impediment to innovation

 

Obviously, open source is a new and very effective means of doing innovation. As a nation or world, we can't afford to throw out this new and powerful means of innovation because it conflicts with a bad law. We've got to fix the law.

IW: Where do you see open source heading in the next five years, especially with regard to development, community, and market opportunities?

Perens: I think that most reporters are misreading the economics of open source, and I hope that changes. You see a lot of publicity for companies that put open source in a profit center, like MySQL. But for most companies, open source is operated in an IT cost center. Many open source developers are paid these days, but the majority are actually working for customer, not vendor, organizations. For those companies, open source is a way to distribute the cost and risk of developing non-business-differentiating software that they need to support their own operations, but which isn't particularly visible to their customers. Those folks are interesting because they don't have the problems with sustainability or conflict of interest that the open source vendors can have.

So, I think the currently underreported and future trend is the shift of the development of non-business-differentiating software within companies to open source. Consider that if you are an IT manager, you can directly help your company's bottom line if you move as much money as possible to developing the software that is customer-visible and provides your company with a business differentiator against its competitors. But where do you get the other 95 percent of the software in most companies, which isn't business-differentiating? You participate in open source communities to build it, and thus spread out the cost and risk with your partners in those communities. You can share the development with them without hurting your company, because the software isn't business-differentiating.

IW: Does widespread adoption and commercialization of open source software create new challenges or pressures for open source projects?

Perens: A big problem facing many companies today is that they entirely depend on open source for their operations, and they haven't even begun to deal with that from a corporate policy perspective. I've met CEOs who haven't known they use open source at all, and then they have found out that all of their most critical projects depend on it.

When I wrote the rules for approving open source licenses, I didn't think that we'd get such a gold rush of companies that there would be 70 such licenses today. Dealing with the combinations of those 70 is too complicated. I direct my customers to three licenses that are compatible with each other and that provide for most of the business purposes of releasing open source. That's all you need.

I think our next steps might not be in software. Today, Wikipedia is one of the world's largest content providers, and it's open content. What else can we do like that?