Software: Product or Service?
With Microsoft’s rise to dominance in the software industry, it’s easy to think of software primarily as a product, something that is developed, packaged, and sold. In fact, shrinkwrapped PC applications repre- sent only a small fraction of the total software in use.
Most large business applications are either inter- nally developed or else so heavily customized that they might as well be. Most scientific applications are “one- off,” or if built on top of off-the-shelf tools, include a large custom component. Administration, whether of a network, a large computer system, or a Web site, requires the constant development of small tools, scripts, and “glue applications” to make everything work together. Even in the desktop productivity envi- ronment, power users develop macros and other “pro- grams” to automate repetitive tasks.
Whether or not open source is a superior method- ology for the development of packaged end-user soft- ware products is currently being tested in the marketplace. It is already clear, though, that open source is a superior methodology for the development of this kind of custom software. Giving users of a product access to its source code and the right to cre- ate derivative works allows them to help themselves, and encourages natural product evolution as well as preplanned product design.
What’s more, whether or not open-source tech- nologies succeed as packaged products, their greatest economic contribution may be the new services that they enable.
The Internet is the most striking example of a mar- ketplace, full of economic opportunity, that has grown out of the open-source software community. The Internet (and the various networks that eventu- ally became amalgamated into it) was both the mech- anism for and the product of an enormous explosion of collaborative development. Even now, open-source programs such as Bind, Sendmail, and Apache, plus commercial programs emulating functionality origi- nally developed by the open-source community (Web browsing, Internet email), are the heart of the Inter- net. Companies ranging from Uunet (and the entire commercial ISP market), Yahoo (and the whole com- mercial Web), plus suppliers from hardware compa- nies to advertising agencies have benefited from the open-source revolution. The commercial impact can already be measured in billions of dollars.
Perhaps even more importantly, the open-source process reflects a powerful global trend toward net- worked collaboration. Just as the printing press enabled the spread of knowledge during the Renais- sance period, the Internet is enabling large-scale coop- erative development efforts today. The speed at which information spreads has increased by orders of magni- tude. What’s more, the principles of freedom of speech and information interchange take on new sig- nificance in the context of our interaction with com- puters. After all, what is a program but a form of speech with a computer? And what is open source then but the open, public discourse that has always
led to the advancement of human knowledge?
And with the spread of the Web, which mixes human-readable text (HTML files) with programmed sibility of software distribution via FTP, email, and Usenet news enabled a host of independent develop- ers to create unintended benefits simply by passing software around, in a game of “telephone” that some- times led to Babel, but more often led to evolutionary advances.
A brief look at the early history of many open- source projects illustrates the way they were developed to solve a small problem that later turned out to be significant.
Eric Allman originally wrote a precursor to Send- mail because it was easier to route email for other researchers at UC Berkeley than it was to give them a login on his machine. No one imagined that 20 years later, email forwarding across heterogenous networks and systems would be a critical Internet application. Larry Wall originally wrote Perl to solve some nagging
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