Open Source vs. Proprietary Software Platforms: the Market’s Perspective

September 30th, 2009 by Eric Barroca Leave a reply »

Matt Asay, in the good post "Open source is a platform, not a product", is claiming the end of the platform wars because open source has won. Clearly, open source platforms are winning. Just take Eclipse (development apps and desktop apps), Java, Android, etc.

But saying that open source platforms are winning doesn't mean the platform wars are over. I would say the contrary. Platform wars will continue, and this helps innovation (if the wars stop, then I would worry actually). We'll see a lot of open source platform wars. Competition rules the world! :-)

The question is: why are open source platforms winning? I don't think it's because of their flexibility. Flexibility is a feature of a software platform open source or not. Being open source doesn't give you inherent flexibility, goodness or ease of use. Of course, flexible platforms win, and often they happen to be open source. But not always. :-)

I think the core reason lies in the intrinsic economic efficiency: open source is a better way to produce software platforms from a market perspective. It's just more efficient at the macro-economic level, factoring cost and fostering collaboration. Hence, it wins. Period.

I believe the economic efficiency aspect is key in the success of open source software, especially for platforms. And it's not pure magic. Open source licensing scheme and open development models enable collaboration between self-interested entities, which can combine forces as they need within a clear legal framework, and such without a complex initial collaboration setup and big contracts negotiation.

And as platforms are inherently meant to serve a wide range of needs and people, open source reveals its superior nature: it enables great collaboration between actors using the platform, hence aggregating their work to advance the platform.

This virtuous cycle is clearly shown by great successes such as the Eclipse Platform (the more vendors joined the game, the more Eclipse became the de facto platform for dev tools), Apache projects, WordPress as a blogging platform, Firefox and WebKit as browser platforms (on different fronts), and the list goes on…

And, open source doesn't kill innovation. Quite the contrary – thanks to the inherent openness of the model and the competitive nature built-in (forks are an extreme example) – open source fosters great innovation.

So yes, as Matt says, for any given market segment, open source platforms win, are about to, or at least represent a significant share. But it's not because of their flexibility or because of their open source license. It's because the open source licensing scheme catalyzed by an open development model bring so much efficiency that it beats any proprietary competitor.

That's economic reality, not software architecture. And it's a lot stronger!

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  • http://profile.typepad.com/6p0120a605919c970c Michael Kowalski

    Open source platforms might be winning (though I’d say it’s debatable), but open source apps certainly aren’t. Mostly because open source has so far not proven a very good model for delivering good user experience, and that’s about the most important thing about any app – even trumping “economic efficiency”. Would you call a CMS a platform or an app? Well, bit of both, and some are more platformy than others. User experience often sucks though.

  • http://cestjonathan.blogspot.com/ Jonathan Saint John

    Open source Stronger indeed — economic reality is the thrust that will push Open Source to the forefront! I also believe the UI within Open Source can be a good model for delivering a great user experience — after all you own the innovation!

  • http://profile.typepad.com/ldubost ludovic

    Michael, I think this aspect is a question of time. Indeed user experience is challenging for Open Source communities where the representers of users are less numerous than developers. However we see a change progressively. We have seen in our community (XWiki) more and more users getting involved as well as professional designers and user experience engineers weight in and help us improve the application. I fully agree with Eric that Open Source is just a superior model to build software. That said, switching of models does not happen overnight as the “challenger” model needs to prove it’s story with less money initially. For this model to be applied in a specific domain there is still the prerequisite of the investment to be focused on the Open Source model. In the domain of applications we are just at the beginning of budgets flowing towards the Open Source providers, so there is still a LOT of margin of progression.. Expect a major wave coming.

  • http://www.databasepublish.com Joe Bachana

    Nice post, Eric. Here’s my take: I think its all about one thing that puts Open-source in a position to cream the commercial marketplace: All about numbers. Remember that scene in Lord of the Rings where the Orcs are swarming in the (seemingly) millions over the walls of Helm’s Deep? Consider that open-source solutions have thousands of adherents working any time of day or night on various aspects of the open-source community. This doesn’t just include the open-source products everyone’s using. I’m including Wikipedia, dmoz, Facebook (yes I’m lumping it in there since its free and anybody can develop against their API’s), Twitter, and so forth. Where there is a market need, there are throngs of people aggregating to contribute. There will still be organizations that only will buy commercial products so as to reduce their risk exposure (one neck to throttle, centralized quality assurance and support). However, I think that the way the commercial vendors can win is in the same manner that we saw in Lord of the Rings at Helm’s Deep (yes, I am a serious geek, I know it): Highly organized, discipline execution and strategy. With tight operational protocols, highly focused product roadmaps, and top notch QA, implementation and training/support services, the commercial vendors will continue to hold or even grow their market share with loyal customers that will pay the premium for quality.

  • http://blogs.nuxeo.com/ebarroca/ Eric Barroca

    @Michael Kowalski: Well, the software industry as a whole is not so good at designing great UI. Open source or not. You can’t compare features of “open source vs proprietary”, it’s pointless. What you can do is compare feature / UIs of specific products. Really, it has nothing to do with being open source or not.

  • An interested observer

    Matt Asay is not a credible authority … none of us out here believe a word he says … he is just a shill for the open source world. Good luck to you all,