Admirer of Truth

Google (as a company) is one of the world’s most ardent supporters of open source software. Beyond creating Chrome and Android, Google also sponsors the Summer of Code and provides hosting for countless other open source projects on Google Code. But unfortunately, Google (as an advertising-supported business model) may actually be the open source movement’s worst enemy.

How? It’s simple. Through AdSense and other publisher programs, Google has created an ecosystem where the dominant business model on the web is to give away a product for free and monetize it through advertising. Consequently, most software(-as-a-service) on the internet is free. As web-based software becomes free, it takes the wind out of the sails of the open source movement. If you can use so much awesome software for free these days, it’s much harder to be passionate about open source.

Of course, the original point of the open source movement was not just to let everyone have software gratis. The point was to allow everybody the freedom to tinker with code. As Richard Stallman puts it, we should support open source software because it is “Free as in freedom, not free as in beer“. Preserving this freedom allows for code to have greater security, for data to have greater portability, and for systems to have greater customizability. In other words, there are a lot of reasons to love open source software beyond the unbeatable price.

Yet somewhere, we lost our way. Instead of these principles, it seems that people’s disgust for paying for expensive proprietary software is what truly gave the open source movement its passion and its urgency. Linux was to be the antidote to Windows. MySQL the antidote to Oracle. And the list goes on.

Now with most web-based software being free, that urgency is gone. When was the last time you heard a chorus of people demand open source versions of web software? Where are the vociferous calls for an open source Google, Facebook, or Twitter? People are readily willing to stifle their urge to tinker so long as they can get these services delivered for free.

Going forward, I do hope that companies will still honor the principles of software freedom by releasing more open source software, whenever appropriate. (Hopefully not just to commoditize competitors). But I fear that the golden days of open source are gone. The movement is dead… just another victim of Google’s success.