

The Disappearance of Open Source? - ekaln
http://www.ostraining.com/blog/general/the-dissapperance-of-open-source/

======
tytso
Open source used to be used as a marketing tool --- people believed that
software was automatically better if it was Open Source. Today, people have
learned how to be more nuanced; just because it is better in some FSF sense
(if it is "free software" in the Stallman/GPL ethical/moral sense of the word)
doesn't mean it's better for a particular business purpose. If you're a
developer, or your company has a development shop where it's prepared to make
changes, then obviously Open Source is better.

If however, you're prepared to contract out support and development to a
company like Red Hat, then from your perspective as a customer, it may not
matter as much. As long as you are willing to pay $$$ to Red Hat and the
software/services/support is of sufficient quality for your purposes, you're
happy. Now replace "Red Hat" with "Oracle" in the above statement; does it
still work? Why, yes. So you really won't care if it's Open Source or not.

At one point there was an argument that Open Source is good because you're
free to change to a different vendor. i.e., if you don't like Red Hat's
services, you could always switch to SuSE. In practice, alas, the ways in
which various boot and configuration scripts are set up are just a tiny bit
different enough that it's often not trivial to switch from one Linux provider
to another. So the main difference is whether or not you're willing to make
changes to the source code and recompile. But if you're a Red Hat customer,
the moment you do that you use lose support for your modified package. So most
Red Hat customers probably don't take advantage of the fact that all Red Hat
software is "open source", at least not in a direct way. And in that case, why
bother trying to use it as a marketing term?

------
bergie
The reason is very simple: Open Source has become a standard way for the
industry to produce software, with even companies like Microsoft and Apple
participating. So mentioning it in you marketing materials is a bit like
emphasizing that your software _runs on computers_.

~~~
ekaln
Hi Bergie

As the original author, that's a great explanation and I like it more than my
own :)

It's probably true in quite a few areas of the enterprise where the buyers are
more discerning.

Unfortunately, the mass market users still tend to have fits over the phrase.

~~~
bergie
Thanks! Feel free to quote it in your post :-)

I think I'll try to find the time to write a longer response on this,
especially on why I think that while Open Source won as a software production
model, most companies still don't get the open way of working
([http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/open_source-free_software-
what_we_...](http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/open_source-free_software-
what_we_need_is_open_projects/)), and users still don't benefit from the four
freedoms (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software#Definition>) that come
from free software.

------
uiri
I find it ironic how Open Source was originally coined to pitch the practical
benefits of free [as in speech] software to business-types without having
confusion between free-as-in-freedom and free-as-in-price and now Open Source
has become so synonymous with free-as-in-price that it has essentially the
same problem it was coined to solve.

~~~
veridies
Similar to <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemism_treadmill>, but
in a positive way. I can't think of any other non-negative examples.

------
augusto_hp
Good note! I've (for quite some time now) just given up on explaining the real
meaning of open source. Hey, Stallman is crazy enough to try and fail year
after year, let him keep doing that.

The main question missed in the article, IMHO, is: Is this bad for Open Source
at all? In the end no. Hey, Open Source is huge! It is bigger than it was and
probably it will be even bigger in the future. In the end, I think "Open
Source" is just a really bad choice of words to use in a comercial strategy.

------
mistercow
>It's disgusting that you guys charge for Open Source training. You're making
money off the hard work of all those volunteers.

My brain hurts so much now.

------
Zarel
I don't think it's entirely fair to compare "then-and-now" screenshots for
number of mentions of the phrase "open source". It seems to me that the
redesigns simplify, and remove redundant text, which could also be a cause of
the fewer mentions.

------
shootthemoon
I don't think using Red Hat as an example offers that much sway. Red Hat has
been trying to go "pay" for over 10 years.

