Open Source Changed the World

Why the open-source movement was embraced by the global software development community, and continues to shape the world

I have been fortunate to work as a software developer for the better part of thirty years. Throughout that time I have been a witness to history — seeing the rise and fall of countless organisations, technologies, and computing platforms.

My departure from college coincided with the first distributions of Linux being unleashed on the world — and perhaps more importantly, the growth of the open-source movement.

While products and technologies often become consigned to history, ideas don’t — while “open source” might have started as an ideological crusade against the commercialisation of Unix in the 1970s, it has slowly spread throughout the world as a “better way” to work together.

I thought it might be interesting to pick apart some of the reasons why the open-source movement has been embraced — to explore the reasons for its success.

Low barriers of entry

One of the most common fallacies surrounding open source software is that it is “free”. While it’s true that initial outlay is free, you really need to factor in the cost of education, training, support and maintenance to get a true picture of cost. The fact that initial outlay is low is important — it allows organisations the freedom to evaluate, compare, and explore potential solutions in real-world scenarios with low initial outlay — which in turn frees up resources for investment in skills development rather than product licenses.

Transparency

When a project is opened to the world, the world gets to take it apart and find out what makes it tick. Not only does this apply a certain amount of peer pressure on developers to write neat, elegant code — it also allows those inspecting it to take advantage of modern source control systems such as Git to trace the life story of a project — discovering how it evolved and changed during development.

When reading through a well structured, well-commented codebase, future developers benefit from lessons learned in the past.

Quality

The impact of third parties access to software source code cannot be overstated. As a developer, knowing that others will see your code encourages you to go the extra mile — to choose the better solution to a problem, rather than the cheaper, or less elegant method.

As a community of developers forms around a solution, the project benefits from their collective skills, experience, and ideas — the quality of a solution is no longer shackled by that which can be achieved by a finite group, in a given timescale, to an available budget.

Reliability

As the community around an open-source solution grows, the environment surrounding installed instances of the solution becomes more diverse. Use cases are encountered that were never envisaged.

Where software testing tends to centre around expectations, assertations and presumptions, the real world tends to be far more complicated and messy. Unexpected scenarios encountered by the community not only lead to the exposure of oversight but also encourage that same community to invest in reporting and helping solve encountered problems.

Security

When source code is freely available for the wider community to examine, it follows that developers take more care writing secure code than they might if working on a closed-source “black box”. Security shortfalls in closed source software are commonly caused by both time and budgetary constraints — where “security through obscurity” is all too often qualified as satisfactory — often by those unqualified to make such judgements.

Freedom

Investing in, and relying on proprietary software — especially in terms of operational infrastructure — increases the risk of becoming “locked-in” to a solution, framework, or product set. Not only is the organisation constrained by the feature-set of the software, it is also constrained by the future development plans and business model of the supplier. The tail wags the dog.

Basing infrastructure on open standards, supported by open source software, encourages operational flexibility — opening up the freedom to exchange infrastructure components with low relative impact in terms of the organisation.

Standing on the shoulders of giants

Isaac Newton famously wrote that if he had achieved anything of note, he had done so only by standing on the shoulders of giants. Investing in the open-source software community achieves a similar result.

It is no accident that the likes of Microsoft, Google, Apple, and IBM have been embracing open source projects within their own offerings, opening the source code of their own projects, and investing in existing projects in recent years. While it’s easy to dismiss their involvement as an attempt to win the hearts and minds of the next generation of developers, an old saying also comes to mind — “a rising tide lifts all boats”.

Paying it forward

Choosing to “pay it forward” by opening source code marks the realisation that we are a part of a community — and that by working together we can take advantage of each other’s knowledge, skills, and experience.

Working in an environment that supports education, cooperation, freedom and sharing is infinitely preferable to a transactional world driven by profit, secrecy, constraints, and ownership.