Openness in Tech: An Explainer With NO Tech Jargon
What openness means, and why you should care
Why We Need Openness
In its broader sense, openness is mostly defined by negation. “Being open” means to “not be” closed, as boundaries allow defining closeness more clearly.
The same idea goes for the more specific sense of openness we find in IT. IT mostly took shape during the Cold War with the emergence of a “closed-world discourse¹” emphasizing security through obscurity and global surveillance. This discourse strongly influenced our vision of IT, and continues to do so today. We still tend to see code, innovation, and information as something we need to protect. We still think we can harness benefits by holding on some kind of magical secret.
But the era of secrets is long gone. Now, people expect access to all the information they need, whenever they need. Secrecy in business and technology is considered suspicious. Transparency is key.
And it goes both ways. Customers are now using social platforms on a daily basis, constantly sharing and collaborating with their peers. Here again, secrecy is a far memory, but without necessarily leading privacy to its end. Modern users share a large volume of data. They logically expect proportional control over this data. They can’t accept to be passive anymore. Companies now have to offer everyone both control over their data, and opportunities to actively contribute.
In short, the public now expects transparency and collaboration. This is precisely what openness is for.
What Openness Means
Openness is a broad and fundamental idea which raised on Open Source Software basis before spreading to all areas of information technology and then society, with Open Contents, Open Science, Open Data, Open Education, and so on.
Understanding Open-Source Software is understanding Openness. But this designation itself is misleading. “Open Source” isn’t so much about opening (i.e. sharing) the source code. Putting the source code of a software online doesn’t make it “Open Source.” As we have shown earlier, Openness is strongly linked to collaboration. Sharing your code, ideas, etc., doesn’t serve any purpose if you don’t engage people to challenge and improve them with you.
To cite the Journal of Information Technology, Openness is the association of “accessibility of knowledge, technology and other resources; the transparency of action; the permeability of organizational structures; and the inclusiveness of participation” ². All of that, and more, help us build engagement and produce innovation.
How To Make Money in The Open
Now, all companies need to make money of course. For that, we need to answer the needs of our customers. And in a constantly changing world, knowing what the public actually wants is a real challenge³. Building a successful product requires extensive surveys and tests (aka “crowdsourcing”) to improve market fit.
Openness provides a framework to lessen these needs considerably. By building a project and company with constant contributions from outsiders, we are guaranteed to receive most feedback we need without any additional effort or spending. Better yet, Openness build strong long-term genuine relations, where crowdsourcing only relies on short-term self-serving requests.
But this doesn’t answer the main question all people have when talking about Open Businesses: how can we make money if we share our product with everyone? After all, companies like Louis Vuitton don’t provide Open Specifications to show how to build my own luxury bag. There should be a good reason behind that, right?
Right. And this reason’s called branding. Luxury brands like Louis Vuitton need to guarantee a certain level of quality for their products, because it’s linked to their brand image. Controlling manufacture is their only option⁴.
Openness in technology is the opposite. First, because the software is, by definition, immaterial. Copying it doesn’t lessen its quality. And second because by adopting Openness principles, you can prove to your customers your mastery of the related topics.
Here, again, Open Source isn’t enough by itself. We need to nurture a constant collaboration flow with the community to guarantee we have a better brand image and innovate faster than the competition.
Based on this image and constant innovation, a company can offer a large set of offerings around its Open Sourced productions:
- Software As a Service, to make the software easier to use, more stable, more efficient, etc.,
- proprietary (i.e. “closed”) extensions on top of an Open “core” to answer more specific needs,
- Professional Services, like consulting, support and training,
- and more.
Why We Can’t Afford Closeness
Some companies can still manage to make money by selling proprietary software.
First, there are Big Corps, like Microsoft or Oracle. Their first common denominator is a very strong and well-established brand. A brand they can use to build trust from customers and collaborators, thus reducing their need for collaboration⁵. Today, most startups don’t fit in this category. They are the “new challengers who’s here to disrupt the market with innovation and an outsider’s perspective”. They need to use weapons that fit this challenge.
Then, there are the products for non-technical people, on which the brand image and market fit can be built with traditional marketing tools like ads and surveys.
Developer oriented startups’ first goal is to address developers’ needs. This audience isn’t sensible to traditional marketing but has high expectations for openness and collaboration.
Furthermore, Data Privacy is strongly linked to information security and trust. And no one still believes those topics can be addressed via secrecy. Everybody (especially developers) is aware that computers aren’t trustworthy. We need to open the hood and check how the engine works. To ensure the security software we use can guarantee security by itself, using solutions like end-to-end cryptography.
We strongly believe this is the only option as we enable developers build software users love and trust.
[1]: Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World (MIT Press, 1996)
[2]: Schlagwein, Daniel, et al. “Openness” with and without Information Technology: A Framework and a Brief History., Journal of Information Technology, vol. 32, no. 4, 1 Dec. 2017, pp. 297–305
[3]: Shifting context, shifting priorities — Time for a strategic change?, Ipsos, 11 Dec. 2020
[4]: Well, actually, there are other options, but let’s keep it simple here.
[5]: Yet, now, we can see Microsoft and even Oracle are progressively embracing openness, on a small but growing scale, which further prove our point.
