The Success of Open Source
Steven Weber
Harvard University Press, 2005; 320 pp., $16.95; ISBN 0674018583
Steven Weber's The Success of Open Source is more than an academic study recounting the open-source movement from a political-science perspective. In clear and jargon-free language, Weber balances rigorous academic research with real-life anecdotes, abstract political theories with concrete analogies and case studies. Readers seeking the passionate rhetoric usually linked with the open-source movement may be disappointed. On multiple occasions, Weber makes it clear that evangelizing the open-source movement is not his intention. He provides an impassionate and insightful—and at times critical—analysis of a collective network that empowers people to experiment, enables the free flow of ideas, and creates a governance system based on distributed innovation. In his own words, this study is not a claim that open source is necessarily a good thing, nor is it an attack on rational choice models of human behavior.
The major thesis of The Success of Open Source is that open source radically and irreversibly inverts the known notion of property configured around the right to exclude, introducing instead a culture of inclusion and distribution. Weber defines open source as a "governance system that holds together a community of producers around this counterintuitive notion of property rights as distribution." As a political scientist interested in the impact of technology on national systems of innovation, Weber approaches open source in an analytical framework, drawing parallels between the lean production of Toyota and the volunteer network of the nascent open-source culture. Arguably, Weber's greatest achievement is his uncanny ability to explain the business case for open source without falling into the camp of fervent open-source advocates.
What makes this book accessible to a larger nontechnical audience is its unique vantage point—political economy. Fundamentally, the book is about property as a social construct, what it means, and how the open-source movement has transformed the concept of ownership.
One of the central arguments raised inThe Success of Open Source is whether open source makes business sense. Weber answers in the affirmative. Very much in the political-science tradition, he discusses the value of open source in terms of ideal types. After discussing generic business models for open source such as support sellers and loss leaders, Weber provides real-life case studies, including Bitekeeper, VA Linux, and Red Hat Software. Far from idealizing the open-source experiment, he exposes the complex reality behind the wall of hype, in which the relationship between open source and proprietary communities is less than idyllic. Yet the door is wide open, the potential is there, and the production logic of open source is promising to redefine more than just the software world. Indeed, what makes open source a viable alternative to proprietary intellectual products is not just its popularity but also its effectiveness. Business initiatives such as Bitekeeper, VA Linux, Red Hat Software, and Sun Microsystems reinforce the power of open source as an enterprise-level alternative to proprietary software. Sun's ambivalent relationship with the open-source community, as well as Netscape's not-so-successful experimentation with open source might compel one to be cautious, but it might be instructive to point out that when it was first conceived, Minics failed as a collective project in the 1960s, only to inspire a programmer from Bell Labs to create UNIX. Software diehards UNIX and Linux lend credibility to the argument that many people find open-source code more functional, reliable, and faster to evolve than proprietary software.
Being a political scientist, Weber views collectives with skepticism, excluding altruism as a possible underlying motive. Yet he argues that open source is a nascent culture of distribution, fun, and creativity rooted in the competition history of software in the 1960s.
While Weber acknowledges the uniquely idealistic, creative, and at times fanatical voice of open-source leaders and followers, he nevertheless argues that its conception had little to do with idealism; in fact, it was born out of pragmatic reasons.
Open source became an alternative to proprietary software mainly after AT&T, and later Microsoft, decided to capitalize on the commercial value of software products, restricting access to source code. What had previously been a noncommodity was now locked away very much like the Coca Cola formula. Microsoft's letter to "hobbyists" and the Halloween documents mirrored the looming cultural war between two competing views of intellectual property.
In a rapidly globalizing world, The Success of Open Source holds the intellectual key to the future of the Digital Age. It is an indispensable resource for computer scientists who want to make sense of the cultural logic of capitalism, for social scientists who want to keep up with the developments in the information technology, and bookworms who need the kind of food for thought that only thinkers of Weber's caliber may provide.
DDJ
