Open Source: Tell Me Why I CareOpen Source: Tell Me Why I Care

My first panel for South by Southwest was titled, "Open Source: Tell Me Why I Care." Four advocates discussed the reasons for using open source. Pleasantly, there was almost no Microsoft-bashing, and only a little discussion of using open source because it's socially the right thing to do. "One of the myths that keeps people away from open source is that it smells a little bit like patchouli," said one audience participant. Instead, the panel offered hard-headed, practical reasons why using open source makes sense. The arguments will be pretty familiar to open source advocates, but they'll be compelling to anyone who's sitting on the fence, currently committed to proprietary software and worried about the risks of using open source.

Wired contributor Annalee Newitz pointed out that we often use open source products and might not even know it. Firefox and OpenOffice.org are popular desktop applications, while Linux, WordPress, Apache, Rails, and PHP are open source products software frequently used to power popular Web servers. BSD Unix, an open source operating system, underlies Mac OS.

Elisa Camahort, of Blogher, acted as the voice of the skeptical user on the panel. She asked where open source users can go for tech support. With big corporate software, even though support is often bad, there's somewhere to contact where people are responsible for supporting customers.

Erica Rios, Internet project manager for the Anita Borg Institute, said the communities supporting open source products are available through the Internet, and they're very friendly and responsive. "I can go to the Web site and ask a question and not have people say, 'Read the freaking manual,'" she said.

One of the criteria the institute uses when selecting software is determining whether documentation is adequate. They use the open source WordPress to maintain their Web site, and find a wealth of documentation on the Web. Not all of it is formal, hierarchical documentation; a great deal of information is available through Google searches. Documentation for open source products is often written in plainer language than for commercial software, which makes it easier for IT managers to understand and, even more so, easier for IT managers to explain situations to nontechnical users.

One of the people in the audience of the panel jumped in to say that quite a few companies make a business out of supporting open source products. A customer contracting with these companies will find the support experience for open source similar to commercial software. These companies, like Red Hat, have a greater financial incentive to provide tech support than proprietary software vendors do, said David Strauss, of Four Kitchen Studios, a Web design, writing, business intelligence and print services company in Austin, Texas.

"Instead of a company that sold you your license and already has your money, you have a company that's getting money for support," he said. "They know you can go elsewhere for support."

The community nature of open source allows users to build relationships and friendships with peers who support each other, Rios said. If you run into problems with open source, you can literally ask a friend for help, and that friend will be a lot more helpful than a faceless drone working for a tech-support hotline for proprietary software. "I find that much more helpful than getting a regurgitated manual from an 800 line," she said.

Intellectual property issues can be a problem, said Newitz, but they're also a problem with proprietary software. Vendors of proprietary software get into intellectual property disputes.

Nonetheless, open source has its special intellectual property pitfalls that users need to watch out for. In particular, the General Public License prohibits companies from using GPL code in proprietary software. But the GPL is only one of a broad variety of open source licenses available; others, like the license used for the Firefox browser, permit users to include open source code in proprietary software. Users looking to use open source code for business purposes need to do their legal research, ideally by bringing in lawyers, or, alternately, by searching the Web for open source legal information by attorneys.

One audience member raised security concerns, saying if anyone can read the source code, then attackers could read it to, and could find flaws. Panelist Dawn Foster, director of community and partner programs for Compiere, an ERP and CRM software company, said she's not too worried about that, because the transparency of the code makes it easier to find and fix flaws. "I worry more about back doors and things in proprietary code that I don't know are there," she said.

The panel discussed political reasons for using open source software. Camahort noted that many people make business decisions for social reasons, buying organic foods and Fair Trade products. The decision which software to use is no different.

"It is ethical to use the software that is greatest good for the greatest number of people," Newitz said.

This is the part where I started to bristle a little, because it touched on some of the anti-capitalist rhetoric that's distasteful in the open source movement. Many open source advocates act like the free market is inevitably a sweatshop, and "profit" is a dirty word.

Newitz said that open source software is better because the authors have ownership of the product. With commercial software, the authors are writing for the corporation, which gives them less of a commitment to quality.

Rios said open source gives people just getting started in computer science an opportunity to see real, working code. She said her organization is devoted to helping women get invovled in technology. The financial cost of licensing proprietary software is a barrier to entry in computer science.

"If all the software code is proprietary, I would never have looked at a piece of code in my life, period. I can't afford it," she said, adding that she's financially fairly well off. Rios said she has a computer science degree.

One audience member said that he wanted to dispel the notion that open source is anti-capitalist. He said the community tends toward the libertarian. "Part of the reason my company went toward open source is that we were spending so much time and money chasing clients on copyright issues. We got a better rate for our time just offering a consulting service and releasing the software for free."