Open source success: A question of 'trust'
In a former life, I did a Masters degree in International Conflict Analysis (a fancy way to say "International Relations"). As part of my thesis ("The End of American Empire," a discussion of the source of the United States' ideological hegemony and reasons for its imminent collapse), I read Francis Fukuyama's Trust. Basically, Fukuyama argues that high-trust societies (Germany, Japan, United States) tend to be more productive and economically prosperous than low-trust societies (Italy, France, Korea). Trust matters, and translates into cash.
Whether Fukuyama's theory matches up with the real-world economies or not, I do think it applies well to software. Jason Matusow of Microsoft once related an interesting survey that he/Microsoft had conducted. (This is public information - he related it at a conference in Toronto.) 60% of the surveyed customers felt that access to source code was very important. Of these, 95% said they would never look at the source code, and 98% said they would never modify it. So why did they care?
Trust. Or lack thereof. Not lack of trust that Microsoft had their best interests at heart (I actually think Microsoft generally does have its customers' best interests at heart, but goes about securing them in the wrong way), but just a desire to have a safety net under their relationship with the vendor.
One of the great things about open source is that it heightens product permeability - you can see what you're getting before you come to the decision point: buy or don't buy. As in a strong-trust society, the barriers to enter into contracts, associations, etc. are diminished. IT decisions are based on maximum information (perhaps too much information at times?), not marketing messages and sales guys with good hair. That's why I like this slide we use at Alfresco:
No, trust isn't unique to open source companies, and an open source company is just as capable of acting in ways harmful to trust as a proprietary software company is. But the foundation is more amenable to trust. And, if Fukuyama is right, this means that over time, trust-based software economies (open source) will trump the closed software economies.
2 comments:
I'm sorry but your post still fails to convince me that source code access is the most important ingredient for trust (and just to clear any potential confusion - I am an active committer to several OSS projects)
The reality is that most people just don't have the time/resources to do anything useful with the source code, so other aspects of trust do matter more indeed
Take for example JBoss - they give the source to everyone, yet quite a lot of people wouldn't say they trust JBoss Inc too much and would rather use Apache Geronimo. So what's the difference - you get the source in both cases.
But maybe the source is irrelevant after all, and it's the reputation and the relations with the community that matters most (and you can have this in a commercial product as well)
I very much like open source. And I like the philosophy of open source management, and work for one of Alfresco's partner consulting companies.
I'm curious to the additional context of the slide. Are we comparing apples to oranges here? Sales, shipping, marketing and reception are still disjoint areas of an open source corporation. True, developers may have more immediate feedback to bugs and customers, but volunteers on the internet are not creating marketing materials. For an open source project as Alfresco, which is managed by a company, traditional silos still exist, no?
How can we take the principles of open source management: information transparency, distributed workers, trust, and open code and better connect with our customers?
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