Open technology is cheaper, stronger, more reliable, more fun and more rational than closed technology. Open source is most well formed in the web software industries, and HTML5, the brand for open web technology, has built enormous business value on top of this approach to commercial software.
Table Of Contents:
- Standards Drive Down the Cost of Production
- Standards Are for Common Problems
- Engineers Like Open Source
- The Open Source Workflow
- HTML5 Brings New Business Value
- The Web of Open Software
- There Is Always A Reason To Spend Money On Open Web Technology
Standards commodify technologies. When one approach to solving a problem is standardized, and one programming interface for interacting and consuming this solution is idiom-ized, the cost of using that technology (hiring programmers that know it, finding companies that support it, and so forth) becomes less expensive.
Open source software allows for standards to emerge within a given industry or problem space. Because open source software is free to use and free of intellectual property restrictions, stakeholders from competing organizations consume and develop the technology, improving the core of the open source project
In order to standardize a technology, standards bodies (like the W3C, ECMA, and others) make these technologies free (as in beer). That is, all members and contributors are required to forfeit essential claims to relevant patents.
When technology is open sourced, major stakeholders feel safe using and contributing to these technologies. This is in contrast to proprietary technologies whose stakeholders may choose to troll and sue their users for nearly arbitrary reasons.
Open sourcing the solutions to common problems in your software is cheap, and returns a lot of value.
The release-early-and-often always-be-shipping mantras of today’s startup culture actually grew out of the earliest healthy open source community: linux. In his 1997 essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Steven Raymond describes Linus Torvalds’ style as “release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity”.
The lean startup movement loves this approach, because it gets customer feedback early, and mitigates the risks associated with product development in a bubble. The same is true for libraries and frameworks; open sourcing these components early and often lets you delegate bug finding and fixing to your users. You get the benefit of early feedback..
Another often overlooked benefit to using open source is that engineers like it. In addition to speed and resource saving, engaging in open source affords engineers an opportunity to be included in and recognized by a community of peers. Engaging in open source is also a way for engineers to find and learn new technologies. Learning new things is hugely important for engineer quality of life. Kiran Prasad, LinkedIn’s mobile development lead, recently told Venture Beat “getting to play with a trendy new technology is like candy for most developers” and that this was one of the reasons they used Node.js on their new mobile product.
Open source software is one of the major ways that we learn about compelling and elegant solutions to problems from our peers.
In the preface to his book, The Hacker Ethic, Pekka Himanen describes the hacker ethic as “a new work ethic…”, one motivated “…by a desire to create something that one’s peer community would find valuable.”
Developers, engineers, programmers, or what ever you want to call us, are creative people. We are more like artists than we are like scientists. We do our best work in ‘the zone’. We each have our own aesthetics for code organization and syntax. We strive for elegance in programs. In this way we are hackers; tinkerers. We often care more about learning new things and being recognized by our peers than we care about money or vacation days. We love to use new technologies because it gives us a chance to learn new things.
The open source workflow has emerged in it’s own right as a strong choice for distributed and/or large teams. The workflow that Zack Olman describes in his well received How Github Uses Github to Build Github presentation is an increasingly common workflow for the fortune 10 and the lean startup product alike.
fork > branch > commit commit commit > push > pull request > discussion/code review > commit commit > push > discussion/code review > commit > push > … > merge is the workflow in my office, and one that our customers’ teams are benefiting from on their own.
This asynchronous workflow has grown out of the age of distributed open source collaborations between teams and individuals from different companies and time zones, but it is also conducive to the deep uninterrupted focus that programmers want.
Today’s open source workflow was invented by the Linux community and perfected on the web. In the web software industries we have structured celebrity around the release of new open source projects. Recruiters look at github profile repo counts as a new metric, and industry conferences are littered with talks about new microframeworks.
Almost every web application team uses open source software, and they all use Open Web standards. The web software industries represent the most well formed example of open source workflow.
The Open Web Platform, or, HTML5, lends itself to open source software. HTML5 is increasingly becoming an abstraction on top of the operating system, and open source JavaScript libraries act both as a way to add even higher levels of abstraction on top HTML5, and to reform those abstractions and articulate them back to the standards groups.
HTML5 exposes new features to the web application developer that allows us to truly build desktop-style applications in the web browser. Exposing these features to the web browser allows programmers to build the software they have already been building for the desktop, but with the benefits of the open web; easy deployment, instant software updates, no install process, linkability, virality, and more.
This also affords teams the ability to build more maintainable cross platform/device products with a single integrated code base instead of having to maintain separate Mac, PC, Linux, Android, iOS, etc versions of their software.
As the category of web software industry grows with new industries joining every year, and web developers look to those other industries to learn about their software design principles, patterns and approaches, so, too, should those industries look to web development to learn about healthy software workflows. There is always a good reason to spend money on open source.
About the Author
Boaz Sender founded Bocoup, the open web technology company where he does open web research, and runs the Bocoup Gamelab, a venture backed HTML5 games incubator.
Boaz cares deeply about keeping the open web, and this is the focus of his work at Bocoup.
Photo by “Cowboy” Ben Alman
