Since when ScrewTurn Wiki was half-assedly discontinued, I’m mostly an observer/user when it comes to open source.
Excluding random code open-sourced by individual developers, I can clearly see 3 patterns emerging from companies producing open source software. With companies I mean entities that actually pay developers to build software. I’m not getting into licenses and obligatory polemics, I don’t care. The point is what the company is trying to accomplish, or rather get, with their open source strategy.
1. Publicity
Examples: Twitter Bootstrap, ASP.NET MVC.
Companies release stuff as open source to drive users to their platform, products and services. You could argue that Twitter Bootstrap doesn’t really “link” back to Twitter, but it’s also about building an image, constructing a do-gooder aura around the company. It mostly works for what I can tell.
2. Credibility/Trustworthiness
Examples: Feedbin, and what else? (Yes, this post was inspired by the recent announcement of Feedbin’s open-sourcing, and no, I can’t think of another example).
Releasing the entire product stack as open source is a dangerous move. I suspect that the key is having a stack so complex, or so unmaintainable, that no one, in reality, will want to take care of it by themselves, so they’ll just purchase it from the company to avoid the burden – especially for SaaS. If the company is small, however, the move is worth the risk because it gives users – at least some of them – the illusion that, should the company topple, they could continue using/hosting the product by themselves. WordPress is king even in self-hosted blogs, but it’s mostly a mess.
3. Nothing in particular – a.k.a. It’s just another business model
Examples: jQuery, Mozilla.
The point here is building something self-sustained around open source software. It mostly works with sponsors and partnerships (Mozilla is a rather peculiar case), and business models revolve around support, training and other services.
The Common Factor
You will notice a trend: the web. Open source is ever more bound to the web, and for good. This is rather interesting because, if the there is money to invest in indirect “marketing” activities, well that money is around the web. Open source just fits into that model, but it’s just plain better than mere advertising or social media engineering. It gives us something useful, something we can use to build upon.
Besides, if I think about the days when open source was only synonym to Linux – and that was not very long ago – I feel better, liberated somehow, even if open source is a bit less free and a bit more commercial, but also much more sustainable.