Comment Articles

The very real limitations of open source

John Carroll AnchorDesk

Published: 10 Jun 2002 09:55 BST

Open-source interest groups have been putting pressure on national governments to make the move to open-source products. Debate over the issue is active in New Zealand, Germany, Mexico and Taiwan, to name just a few. The basic argument is that open-source products are free, flexible, and unencumbered by hidden, proprietary (and foreign) technology which opponents claim can cause consumers to be "locked-in" to a particular vendor.

Enthusiasm for the benefits of open source, however, should not be allowed to paper over the drawbacks. Specifically, open source has a critical flaw which has little to do with its suitability as an alternative to proprietary products. That flaw consists of a lack of concrete incentive to motivate developers to contribute to open-source projects.

The benefits of open source are apparent. It enables collaborative development on a global scale, as anyone with the skills can view the code and contribute to it. It is highly flexible due to source code access (third parties can customise it completely) and the requirements of a development model wherein the atomic contributions (as in small, not nuclear) of thousands of developers are organised within a single product. It serves as an educational tool, as teachers can show students the inner workings of a production-scale product. It is free, and that makes possible usage scenarios not available to fee-based products (think low-cost routers running a streamlined Linux OS).

The problem, however, is that open source must rely on the willingness of programmers to contribute code without financial compensation. The Free Software Foundation claims that in a world of free software, people will program because "programming is fun." In their opinion, the promise of high returns has corrupted the programming discipline, as people have been "trained" to expect that they will be paid well to program. The solution to this problem is to remove, or at least reduce, the compensation incentive through widespread adoption of open-source software, as stated on the FSF's Web site: "If we take away the possibility of great wealth, then after a while, when the people have readjusted their attitudes, they will once again be eager to work in the field for the joy of accomplishment."

That's a big "if". Would you bet the future of the software industry on it? Consider the difficulties endured by the Mozilla project, which in contrast to more popular open-source projects such as Linux, had trouble attracting developer participation. Simply throwing an open-source party doesn't guarantee that anyone will come.