In his recent Forbes article Cash Me Out (by way of The Register’s Open Season) Dan Lyons likens the assimilation of open source into the mainstream IT industry to the incorporation of gay culture into mainstream culture.

In his article, Lyons references The End of Gay Culture, an essay written by Andrew Sullivan and published in The New Republic in 2005 that argued that the gay rights movement had been so successful that gay culture had been absorbed into mainstream culture. While the success was something to celebrate, it also challenged former definitions of gay culture and identity, according to Sullivan.

The assimilation of any sub- or counter-culture into the mainstream is a divisive moment – signaling as it does both the success of the movement in reaching a wider audience, and the watering-down of its principles by external forces. There are signs that an identity crisis is already impacting the free and open source movements.

An example of the assimilation of FOSS into the mainstream was provided by Microsoft’s successful attempt to have two licenses approved by the Open Source Initiative. There are those that see Microsoft’s creeping engagement with open source as pernicious, and some that thought that the OSI should have discriminated against the software giant by blocking its move.

While this is an obvious example of the blurring of the line between open source and the mainstream, a more subtle – but perhaps more significant – example was revealed in the recent Port25 post by Sam Ramji that revealed how open source has influenced Windows Server 2008.

Here is a clear example of how Microsoft has taken lessons from the success of open source development model and applied them to its own proprietary code development – observing what works for open source and adjusting its development practices accordingly while retaining control over the project.

As Savio Rodrigues noted: “this should scare any OSS proponent. It seems like the folks at Redmond have been busy while the OSS movement has been prematurely readying Microsoft’s eulogy. I hope I’m wrong. But Microsoft simply appears to be meeting the challenge of OSS better than OSS appears to be meeting the challenge of displacing Microsoft.”

And Microsoft is just one example. Everywhere you look in the IT industry there are examples of how proprietary vendors have taken the benefits of open source and applied them to their own products.

“Appistry’s new open distribution program combines the best of open source and commercial software. By making this download available we’re able to let developers experience its benefits immediately, for free, and with no strings attached. Plus, they have the benefit of knowing that the product is commercially supported should they ever need it, and customers like FedEx and GeoEye count on it for mission-critical applications.”
Kevin Haar, Appistry chief executive officer, earlier this week.

I picked that example not only because it is timely but because you could replace the name Appistry with that of any vendor in the IT industry and it would still make sense. How many times have we read variations on this theme in recent years? The trend is set to continue.

Of course, giving software away for free does not make it open source any more than applying a collaborative development methodology within a restricted development team does – so how are the free and open source software movements to respond to these developments?

Clearly while there are things FOSS vendors and groups can do to stop the misuse of FOSS code and the term ‘open source‘ there is little that can be done to prevent the benefits of FOSS development and distribution being applied to proprietary products. Indeed, whether you want to do anything about it depends on whether you see the absorption of open source into the mainstream as a threat or an opportunity.

Sullivan ultimately saw “The End of Gay Culture” as an opportunity – specifically for the gay movement to define itself on its own terms, rather than as a reaction to exclusion from the mainstream. A major difference with the free and open source software movements is that they have already defined themselves on their own terms, either to deliberately exclude the mainstream or to encourage inclusion.

The challenge faced by FOSS is more akin to that faced by the Green movement, which previously defined itself on its own terms but now finds its core message being rewritten by corporate agendas and external forces.

During a recent meeting with open source services firm Sirius it was suggested to me by Tom Callway and Mark Taylor that the Green movement could provide a model of how open source will come to be adopted by the mainstream in the UK despite current ambivalence.

Certainly there are parallels to be drawn between the Green and open source movements, with the tendency of some sections of the mainstream press to dismiss free and open source supporters as sandal-wearing and bread-toting troublemakers or romantic idealists, for example. It’s an image that is almost identical to the one applied to environmental activists in the past.

[Aside – It is not beyond the realms of fantasy to see how open source could be adopted by the mainstream in a similar fashion – particularly the way in which the ecological arguments are now being presented hand in hand with economic arguments.

Perhaps in years to come we will see big businesses boasting about lowering their proprietary licensing footprint through the more efficient use of computing resources, just as today they boast about the efficient use of natural resources. Maybe the laggards could pay someone else to adopt open source for them via proprietary offsetting schemes.

While I am being flippant here, it wouldn’t seem unreasonable for shareholders to demand that businesses justify their spending on IT resources to ensure that profits are being reinvested efficiently. We’ve already seen an attempt Oracle to publish an Open Source Social Responsibility Report, although there was a different agenda behind that move.]

The Green movement has been astonishingly successful in recent years at placing environmental issues further up corporate and personal agendas, but now faces the challenge of maintaining its own identity in a world where the very companies once attacked for destroying the world’s natural resources are now positioning themselves as leaders of the ecological agenda.

Where environmental protesters were once dismissed by the mainstream press in the UK as unwashed eco-terrorists, The Daily Mail now runs style guides enabling “middle Britain” to spot the different types of environmental activist in their local health food shop.

The success of the Green movement in moving beyond the beard and sandals stereotype has not been without a degree of compromise.

“Green consumerism is an oxymoronic phrase,” Paul Hawken, author and environmental activist told the New York Times in 2007. The NYT added that “He blamed the news media and marketers for turning environmentalism into fashion and distracting from serious issues.”

As can be seen from the article, one of the implications has been to split the Green movement between those that see eco-consumerism as a step in the right direction and those that see it as watering down the message to the extent that it becomes meaningless.

It appears that the free and open source movements are on the brink of a similar schism between those that see the assimilation of FOSS into the mainstream as an opportunity and those that see it as a threat. Additionally while there have always been philosophical differences between free and open source software, they are now being highlighted by external factors.

Examples include DRM, with the Free Software Foundation clearly on one side with its Defective By Design campaign and the likes of Linus Torvalds on the other, shying away from such ‘crusades‘. Then of course there is the issue of patents, where there is a much clearer delineation between the haves and have nots, the related issue of interoperability, and licensing – particularly the use if non-OSI approved ‘open source’ licenses called out by Michael Tiemann.

© 2008 Matthew Aslett, 451 CAOS Theory. Original post

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