Devil's Advocate: Twists and turns of open source

Open source is not wholly different to commercial software development. But, says Martin Brampton, it can lead to some unusual and complicated situations you wouldn't see elsewhere.

At times, open source demonstrates both startling contrasts and underlying similarities with commercial software. I've had this brought home to me forcefully in the last couple of months. My involvement with the Mambo open source content management system suddenly changed in a wholly unexpected way.

[W]e now have an interesting situation where two development teams are pursuing quite different philosophies on the furtherance of basically the same product - a situation that could not easily happen in the commercial world.

One intriguing aspect of the contrast is the extent to which purely ethical considerations are debated. The standard open source contracts are brutal in relation to developers. If you work on open source, you can copyright what you create but you can only release it as open source. When you release it, you give up just about every kind of control over it. The sole guarantee is that it will remain open source.

Naturally, defenders of the open source contract say that this is intentional. A critical element in the movement is the idea that nobody takes charge of anything. If someone else can pick up the baton and run further or faster with it, then they must be free to do so. We then find ourselves with two stark contrasts with commercial software.

One is that if software still has potential, it is much less likely to stagnate in the hands of an owner who has ceased to know what to do with it. Moreover, the idea of the fork in a software development, creating two or more rival products, is radically different from the commercial world.

Takeovers (and most mergers are really takeovers) invariably produce fewer and larger units of organisation. The occasional 'de-merger' is usually just the selling off of an unwanted business group to some other large company. In the exceptional case of management buyouts, the intention is usually to run the operation for only a short time before selling out to a large corporation.

These aspects of the commercial software world work in favour of the familiar situation of dominant products that have an effective monopoly. This is widely accepted to be against the broader economic interest. In this sense, the open source model is economically more efficient, since it enables a market to become more diverse rather than less.

The other contrast is the emphasis on ethics. The commercial world shows little sign of paying attention to ethical considerations, which are the antithesis of popular notions such as 'playing hardball' or the 'professional foul'. These seem to imply not only a distaste for ethical considerations but an advocacy of unlawful behaviour provided it leads to overall advantage.

One might be sceptical about the chances of too much emphasis on ethics surviving for long. Yet the character of open source is hard to pin down, with developers motivated by a variety of non-financial considerations. Even when financial considerations do come into it, they are indirect and more complex than in most commercial situations.

In the Mambo case, all these issues have combined to create a muddled and hotly debated situation. While the name and related IP belonged to an Australian company, Miro, an effort to make Mambo into an independent entity controlled by a non-profit foundation ran into difficulties. Before the foundation could reach stability, the company and the open source developers found themselves in irreconcilable conflict.

There is now an offspring of Mambo that is being furthered by the former development team, and claims to be the true successor to Mambo, with a mere name change. There is also a new development team for Mambo, for which, with some trepidation, I have become team leader. Many angry words have been spilled over who has done the ethical thing to whom. I don't know who is right and probably never will.

What I do know is that we now have an interesting situation where two development teams are pursuing quite different philosophies on the furtherance of basically the same product - a situation that could not easily happen in the commercial world. Involvement in it stands to be an interesting and illuminating experience.