Foundation and Empire
- Article 8 of 16
- LinuxUser & Developer, December 2005
Rob Buckley muses on why open source start-ups sometimes fail to meet eye-to-eye with the business world
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But as well as these organic partnerships, there have been attempts all over Europe to create more formal ecosystems of companies that can deliver on bigger contracts. Open Ireland, for example, exists as both a lobby group for promoting open source in the public and private sectors and as a trade organisation that helps to the deployment of open source systems. There are similar bodies throughout the rest of Europe as well, including Denmark and the former Yugoslavia.
The UK has gone further. The Open Source Consortium launched in 2005 as a way to help open source companies sell their services to the public sector. Founder and executive director Mark Taylor highlights the fact that 55% of the UK’s IT work is done in the public sector, but 85% of that work goes to just 11 big companies. “Open source companies can compete in the private sector. But for larger projects in the public sector, the perception that open source is a risk stops them in their tracks.”
As well as promoting open source to the government, the consortium operates in three phases: phase one is an internal market, with the consortium bringing in work that members can compete for; phase two, aka “mini consortium mode”, lets a number of members come together to provide services for a contract; phase three enables the OSC to manage the member companies to provide a single point of management for the client.
Phase three in particular can also draw on expertise in other countries and Taylor says there are already close ties with open source groups in other countries.
It’s a strategy that appeals to many open source vendors, members and non-members alike. “A peer-to-peer organisation is a good idea,” says Jan Hichert, CEO of German open source security firm Astaro. “It would be good to talk to these people. At the moment, very few customers come to us because we’re open source. It would certainly help us if somebody was interested in forming a special focus on open source.”
Open source’s onwards march throughout the world won’t inevitably lead to its eventual dominance. But an emerging eco-system of cooperative open source companies that aren’t “fighting each other for scraps off the table”, as one critic puts it, is going to be equally as important as larger open source companies. These will be necessary for the largest contracts that may require facilities to be built, for example. But, says Taylor, the reality is that there aren’t many contracts of that size in the UK. “By the time there is, we’ll be ready for them.”
Until then, bodies such as the OSC as well as the all-important open source community will have to continue to nurture and support this eco-system. With some elements of the community against profit being made from open source, this will be harder than it should be.
“Open source emerged in Europe, because it ultimately had to come out of a more socialist environment,” argues Index’s Danny Rimer. That socialist environment may have given birth to open source, but for open source to triumph against proprietary software it now has to embrace capitalism. As Mårten Mickos of MySQL pointed out back in sunny Zaragoza, “Making a lot of money is not high on the list of proper civic activities in most European societies. Inheriting money is fine, as is having it and earning it. And sometimes even stealing it. But making money is often seen as verboten. However, to offset the enormous risk that an innovator takes when embarking on a seemingly impossible enterprise, there must be a serious reward awaiting him or her. Otherwise, innovators will not innovate.”
Only by combining the cooperative nature of the open source movement with the desire of capitalism to make money will open source be able to take on proprietary software – and win.
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