I attended two events (with Disruptive Tech London and with OpenUK Ambassadors) that gave me much food for thought on the open source economy. In gist:

  • Open-source tech businesses survive (and sometimes thrive) because they give clients great service and clients have the option of walking out of the relationship at any point.

  • But it is still unclear how one can fairly reward the creators of open-source software, who arguably create the most value in the ecosystem and are not compensated proportionately.

1 History from the 1980s to early 2010s

Before I started programming in around 2022, I heard about open source from the media but didn’t have an intuition on what the debate is about. But as I got deeper and deeper into contemporary techniques on making websites (including sophisticated web apps such as Google and AirBnB), a more nuanced picture emerged.

The precursor of the modern Open Source is Richard Stallman’s Free Software Movement.

When Stallman started out, computers were more or less the exclusive preserve of the some math and engineering elite of the day. At first, there was not much of a sense that software (as opposed to hardware) was something that could be licensed and be of particular economic value. Code was shared by the manufacturer and users, just as one would freely circulate a user’s manual without thinking of charging for it.

But as different sectors began to realise the business potentials of the software industry, this practice changed, and it hugely annoyed Stallman as a (very) early comptuer user. He felt that corporations were creating artificial problems for computer users: making it difficult for them to truly understand and work with their machines, and fix issues as they arise.

So he initiated a Free Software Movement in the early 1980s, which held that all software should be free as a matter of principle. Cf. a favourable biography that is freely availble.

Stallman attracted a following of programmers who developed a set of common tools under an umbrella called GNU. But he and his group failed to develop the kernal, the most essential part of a computer’s operating system, on their own.

Meanwhile companies such as Microsoft and Apple were changing the world by selling close-sourced, propreitary software: and in the late 1980s it looked as though the software industry will develop on the basis that each company can and do guard their source code as their commercial secret.

Enter Linus Torvalds, a Finnish university student who beat Stallman and his team to releasing an operating system kernal in around 1994. Like Stallman, he released the source code to the public. But unlike Stallman, he had no ideological battle to fight, and was happy to use closed-sourced tools when they best fit the job. The Linux operating system changed the IT world. It created a whole industry of companies offering a wide range of businesses around Linux: it is often said that a large majority of web servers use Linux. Cf. the documentary Revolution OS.

The widespread availability of a free operating system, together with other technological improvements including fibre and world wide web, meant that by the 2010s whole new industries are developed.

As recounted Jeff Lawson in his 2021 book Ask Your Developer, there are now a vast number of companies in IT that focus on making very specialised tools: for example, Lawson’s company Twilio is a leading provider of SMS confirmation services.

As opposed to buying IT services from one particular company, businesses now can pick and choose: they can ask

  • company A to provide the memory and CPU (by cloud computing),
  • company B to provide one kind of database (other companies to provide others),
  • company C for design and the user experience,
  • company D to provide client relationship management software, and so on.

Each of these companies could (and often do use) open source technologies, which give the clients the key advantage of being able to switch to another provider if they are unhappy with the service (and avoid “vendor lock in”).

2 A snapshot from 2024

All the above sounds well and good: it was understandable to me even without too much in depth technical knowledge.

Furthermore, the picture from the business perspective was further cemented after I heard talks by Paula Kennedy of Syntasso and Ben Rometsch of FlagSmith.

In gist, their products aimed at tech companies that are above a certain scale and which are likely to have revenue / willing investors. And these companies have the money to want to pay for the makers of the product to provide help them user the product in the best way.

Alexander Scammon of G-Research gave a slightly different perspective. G-Research does not offer a software product and does not have clients as such. But it does rely on open source tools for its work.

For this reason, there is an indirect commercial benefit for it to philantrophically donate code and programmer-hours to support open source work, e.g. to have a say in the direction of development of the tools and to attract talent by maintaining its prestiege in the tech world.

3 Fair reward

But there remains a deeper, still unresolved, question of how key open source contributors ought to be properly resolved.

There are contributors and there are contributors. While there is some initial technical barrier, it is not overly difficult to make small pull requests, e.g. to fix broken link on documenation, or to suggest ideas by way of issues.

But it is no mean feat to create and maintain a project from scratch (e.g. Gleam). And as Alexander relates, some of the major feature updates on a large codebase can take a full-time programmers 6 months to implement. The source code may be open, but it takes deep human expertise (and human effort) to advance the state of the art.

It is unrealistic and unfair for the entire economic burdern to fall on voluntary contributors, especially if businesses use these tools to directly or indirectly generate profits.

There doesn’t seem a straightforward answer. Other than Github sponsors, one solution mentioned by Alexander is Tide Lift, which aims to find a fair way of renumerating maintainers.

But at the end of the day, no one is obliged to maintain any open source software. The culture of open source is only what it is now due to the technical achievements and the personal predilections of a few individuals at key moments of history: Stallman, Torvalds and Berners-Lee could very well have chosen not to contribute to open source, but decided to do so.

As well as a dystopia where energy becomes scarce and computation efficiency again becomes the programmers’ holy grail, one can readily imagine a future where the talented developers work for close source tech companies, and state of the arts tools are no longer open source.

While no doubt influenced by wide business and social factors, the development of technology is also influenced by human choices, some times by a select few of talented individuals. The fact that cutting-edge software is now often open source should not be taken for granted.