It’s no secret that the internet poses new challenges for conventional business production models. Like the industrial revolution before it, the technological changes of the internet age mean some industries are struggling to stay alive and compete with the new realities of the marketplace. The way we see this happening is two-fold. On the one hand you have those who are struggling to compete with the internet because it offers a technological solution for their customers that actually replaces their original product; newspapers, for example. And on the other hand, you have those companies which offered a digitally reproducible product in the first place, but are now finding themselves unable to control it out in the vast global economy; record labels, for example.
Well we see a third emerging category which is just on the brink of truly entering the fold; the collaborative community product. The best example we can think of is Mozilla Firefox. In 2004 Microsoft’s Internet Explorer held roughly 80-90% of the market share for web browser software; a true monopoly by anyone’s standards. In the six years since Firefox has managed to snatch a whopping 20-32% of market share that was squarely in Microsoft’s hands. What started off as a niche browser for tech-savvy developers is becoming more and more mainstream everyday. Why has this occurred?
Open Licensing promotes productivity and community
Corporate software giants spend endless sums of money on trying to hire the right employee to head their software development teams. Diversity hiring, as it is sometimes called, is the corporate way of trying to promote innovative ideas from free thinking individuals. The only problem with this strategy is that corporate culture is so competitive, the real free thinkers are often not considered for the position for whatever reason; qualifications, poor people skills, or a poor reference from past employment. Some firms may simply feel like they can’t afford to pay a yearly wage to someone who doesn’t suit the corporate culture.
As a result, corporate software development teams are constituted from educated, well presented individuals that represent only a small demographic of the population. These individuals are then tasked with creating a universal piece of software that you and me may end up having to use on a daily basis. The result is often an annoying piece of software or set of unintuitive features or practices that we have to have a degree in software engineering just to figure out. Remember this little guy?
Typical intellectual property laws and EULA’s (end user license agreements) mean that legally, only employees of whatever software company created a piece of software can legally modify it. So if you happen to be a software engineering student, or just your average Joe who has a good idea and knows how to implement it into the program, you legally can’t. Over time people have begun to realise this and in 2004 came the birth of a new concept in intellectual property sharing; the open source license. This allows the legal freedom for anyone and everyone to modify the source code behind a program and share or redistribute it to friends, relatives, colleges or anyone.
The results speak for themselves. Not only are all those people who got rejected for the software position now able to make their suggestions heard, but everyone and anyone can. Open source projects allow people from all walks of life or expertise to contribute ideas and innovations. “Social coding” is a term now coined on a number of collaborative sites. Mozilla Firefox is not just a web browser, its our web browser. Anyone can contribute in a number of different ways to the project, you don’t have to have any particular skill.
It’s no surprise that Firefox and other open source licensed browsers like Google’s Chrome are quickly eating up Internet Explorer’s market share. As the umpteenth floor of the Microsoft building in whatever city is working overtime trying to come up with new features and ideas, thousands of people all over the world are collaborating online to build software that works the way they want. And at the end of the day, why would you pay to use software when you can freely obtain it built exactly the way you use it.
The web is communal
By its very nature, the internet is really just one big international border-less community. To ensure that information is displayed correctly for everyone within the community, the World Wide Web Consortium has set in place standards for the technologies used to transfer web pages from computer to computer. In order for this to work, the web browser itself must adhere to the standards. Microsoft has previously been accused of trying to use its substantial market share to change some of these technologies and privatise them for their own use. While these attempts were largely unsuccessful, Internet Explorer versions 5-7 does have some inconsistencies with the established standards. For this reason, it is necessary to road test a page across browsers to ensure there are no inconsistencies across platforms. Open source projects are built with these standards in mind and are often on the forefront of innovations by the W3C.
What else is open?
Firefox is just the beginning of the open licensing software world. It is possible to operate all the necessary software to run a business, do a university degree or work in any number of professions using entirely open licensed products. If you’re interested in going open, we would love to hear from you, why not contact us today and find out how your business can save, money, time, resources and stay up to day using open source software.
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