The Culture of Open Source
Open source (short for Open source software(OSS)) is might be the greatest invention of humanity. You can ask any programmer or people who work in technology-related jobs and they will tell you that open source is one of the driving forces of technological advances. Open source is the foundation of digital transformation that is happening today.
But, what is open source?
Imagine a group of capable and highly technical programmers, who are capable of having a highly rewarding job, gather around to create software for free and that software is distributed for free. That free software is commonly called open source. Mozilla Firefox is an example of an open source.
Free and open source software has been around since the 1950s and 1960s. But, the movement that kickstarted the open source to the mainstream happened in the 1980s.
The story starts with Richard Stallman quitting his job at MIT. Richard Stallman and his colleagues had a printer that got jammed as often as it printed. To fix the issue, Richard altered the source code of the printer so that whenever the printer got jammed it will send a message to the team saying they should fix the printer.
Later, the team got a laser printer that also got jammed as often as it printed. Richard tried to implement the code he used in the previous printer, but he found out that the source code for this laser printer was protected by the company, meaning no one can change or propose a change unless the company allows them. He tried to ask for permission to alter the source code of the printer, got rejected, felt angry, and finally quit his job.
Richard then continued his work at MIT on creating an operating system called GNU. Since Richard started the development of GNU one year after he quitted his job, MIT could not interfere with the distribution of GNU as free software.
The name of Linus Torvalds would soon surface. He created the Linux Kernel which combined with the GNU operating system would become the very first free and open source operating system. After the first Linux Kernel was distributed in 1991, open source was on its way to the mainstream.
Today, the technology that we relied on, such as Apache, Firefox, MySQL, Android, and many more, exists thanks to the culture of open source. It appears that the numbers will keep growing.
The State of Open Source Today
As of 2018, there are already 100 million repositories in GitHub. GitHub is the home for 40 million developers to house their open source project. The numbers will only keep growing as the state of open source is becoming bigger.
Today, open source has proven itself to be an inseparable part of our technological society. A report by RedHat shows that open source will only grow in the future.
A total of 950 interviews are conducted in the report. Most of the respondent comes from the United States (400), with Latin America following (250), and lastly, the United Kingdom and English-speaking country in Asia-Pacific (both 150)
The majority of the respondent (95%) agrees that enterprise open source is important. This does not come solely from enterprises who are working in the cutting edge open source technology, “A cross section of IT decision makers from enterprise-sized companies in 11 countries across many industries voiced that opinion”. More people are becoming aware of the benefit and the strategic value of open source software.
The majority of the respondent also believes that the usage of open source software will continue to increase while the usage of proprietary, or copyrighted, software will continue to decline. One of the main reasons behind this is the high price and the inflexibility of proprietary software.
Behind the bright future of open source, barriers still exist that slowdown or even prevent the adoption of open source software. A couple of those barriers include security of the code, level of support, compatibility, and lack of internal skills to manage and support. But still, the adoption of open source software will continue to increase and so its market size.
According to a report, the open source software market is expected to reach $32.95 billion in worth in 2022. One of the driving factors behind this growth is the accessibility of the code. Enterprise can easily study and modify the code as per the customer requirement.
However, beyond the glittery numbers in revenue and sales, open source is a culture. It is a way of doing things, namely production.
The Culture of Open Source
Open source is a way of decentralizing production. It promotes open collaboration to work towards a common goal. It is a culture where people continue to work and contribute on the existing foundation to build something they want.
Open source software allows the users to use, study, and change the software however they see fit. Open source is not simply about copying-and-pasting others’ code. It is about building and contributing on the already existing foundation or infrastructure, something that can only happen if the software is open sourced.
Open source is often cited as the multi-faceted dimension of our motivation: we are not as easy to manipulate as we think we are. Money is often cited as the number one motivation for people to do things. But, open source culture shows the other way: once the issue of money is already solved, these highly technical people are doing open source projects most of the time for free.
Funding for open source projects that are critical to our digital world infrastructure has become a huge issue. Yet, in the first place, people that start these open source projects do not do it because of money, fame, or recognition. They simply want to innovate because they want to solve their own problem.
There are problems in the open sources’ sustainability as the infrastructure of our digital world. Many people have spoken about the problem, and we should start to listen if we want to sustain the infrastructure of our digital world.
In the end, open source has proven itself to be the most prominent solution to our technological society’s problem. Now, we need to address and solve the problem that can disrupt our open source culture. After all, open source culture is about a proper give-and-take relationship.
