Challenges to Open Source

Yesterday’s OSCON’s Executive Briefing could have been subtitled “Challenges to the traditional Open Source Model” or at least that seems to be what Tim wanted everyone to come away with. Apparently it was also the theme of his keynote this morning (which I missed). The chief challenge has been provocatively declared, “open source licenses are obsolete.” What he means is that the current wave of web application or software as a service don’t follow the traditional open source model. For example, Flickr isn’t open source. You can’t download the Flickr source code and even if you did, what good would it do? The code would be optimised for their particular infrastructure and, quite honestly, wouldn’t do much of anyone any real good. So if more and more software follows this model (something yet to be seen), what is the role of open source?

Also, consider this: what does it mean for a web application or service to be open? Which would be more important: Flickr providing source code or Flickr providing an open API? Is open data more important than open source?

Personally, I don’t think open sourcing web apps makes any sense. Open sourcing web app frameworks? Definitely. Providing open APIs and easy access to data? Absolutely. So what we see here then is a broadening of the “open” concept—Open source, open services, open data. And I also don’t see this as a very large jump for the open source community (perhaps for the free software community though). In fact, while it’s not said anywhere explicitly, the concept feels at home with much of open source.

So what’s the face of open source in the future? Tim suggests it may look like:

• Proprietary Application -> Open API (Flickr, Google, Yahoo!, ...)
• Proprietary Application -> Open framework (Basecamp/Ruby, ...)
• Cloneable apps (Ning)

So, are open source licenses obsolete? No, I don’t think they’re obsolete. But at the same time, the open source community needs to broaden to the larger “open” community of data, source, and services.