What Open Source Can't Do

Host software services. This is a pretty big deal for entrepreneurs looking for business opportunities. Let’s look at some examples.

LogMeIn, which filed to go public in 2008 is basically VNC with a web only client side and central servers that will facilitate NAT traversal across firewalls. Various VNC developers had written software to do this but nobody was willing to maintain the servers. That’s created a business opportunity and a competitive advantage against open source alternatives.

Fog Creek Copilot took advantage of the same opportunity, and in this case they actually used VNC software.

What about a place to host your MP3 play history for other people to see and for other software to mine? Audioscrobbler started to do this, but morphed into a startup called Last.fm.

I’m sure open source blogging software was around when Evan Williams launched Blogger.com. …and look what happened to Blogger.  I wonder what percent of blogs today are ran in the old fashioned way: someone went to SourceForge.net and installed it on their shared server, versus using a company set up to host the  blog for them. I’d bet in favor of the hosted service.

It’s too bad, really. There’s no doubt we’d have better software today if open source projects could get servers and operational resources for free. We’d probably all be using an IM client built around Jabber.

But it’s an opportunity for entrepreneurs, and one that will grow in the age of web services and web experiences. Ask yourself: what open source software exists that solves a big problem in a large market?  Can you add value by hosting it in the cloud?

Comments

[Alex Graveley]

Dude, your blog runs on WordPress.

[Vineet Sinha]

"There’s no doubt we’d have better software today if open source projects could get servers and operational resources for free. "

Google App Engine is inching towards there. Now all we need is the Entrepreneurs that take the open source software, get it running on App Engine and figure out the math to build a hosting app. (AWS also does the same, but App Engine allows you to not need to even take any risk as it starts off free, and you only need to pay when you are successful)

[Patrick Jarrett]

@Abludo, thanks I hadn't seen that headline. We'll see if it turns out to be profitable or not.

[Abludo]

@Patrick

Unfortunately at this time Ubuntu doesn't actually "make money" in terms of profit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2008/oct/28/ubuntu-linux-loss

[bigE]

"We’d probably all be using an IM client built around Jabber"

Like Google Talk? Twitter is another big XMPP user that comes to mind.

[Patrick Jarrett]

I think your blog post is a bit off the mark. Your argument isn't against Open Source, rather it's against free and non-commercialized. Wordpress.com runs off of Open Source software and it's a business. Ubuntu and Mark Shuttleworth are making money off of the servers and the support for open source. Those are just two examples that come to mind.

[dotan]

I'm not saying that this is the stupidest post of all time. All I'm saying is that all the data support that hypothesis.

[Adam]

@AlexGravely: yup, downloaded from SourceForge! : ) Happy to be the outlier.

[Sam McDonald]

I think that open source is only useful when a large chunk of your audience consists of developers. This is why it makes sense for frameworks and even some operating systems to be open source.

I also think that the model of "pay for support" is terrible system. When it comes down, it makes more business sense to make worse and buggier, user unfriendly software, so that there will be more money in support.

[Adam]

I think there's been a bit of confusion around my thesis.

I'm not saying when or whether open source is good or bad. I'm saying that open source projects tend to not run servers that host software for the greater world. That tends to be done by companies.

The point is that contributors to open source projects are willing to write code for free but not willing to wear the beepers that go off when the servers go down.

[Vivekananthan]

"The point is that contributors to open source projects are willing to write code for free but not willing to wear the beepers that go off when the servers go down."

Well said, Same thing happened to many opensource projects, Its not only that but the amount of time value they add in, Very few in the community would raise and take lead for the responsibilities. So any project that community participating completely would have these. That's both the plus minus of opensource.

[Mike E]

The interesting question is, why did SMTP and TCP/IP win where Jabber didn't?

Ask yourself: what open source software exists that solves a big problem in a large market?

Sendmail? Apache? Bittorrent?

Granted, it may be easier for proprietary software to achieve a firm lock-in by virtue of being able to raise initial money; but many centralized services can, indeed should, be built in a more scalable peer-to-peer arrangement anyway.

Open source is software, running servers is business. If anything, open source is a business input. Yahoo!, Google, Asus, ISPs, internet media and other businesses use OSS to offer better deals. Selling open source software (i.e. selling installation, customisation and maintenance services) can also be a business but it is not the open source.

Actually the entire paradigm shift in the FOSS approach is that it perceives software as a cost, to be minimised through sharing rather than as a profit to be obtained by selling boxes or by sitting on copyrights.

Seen from the proper angle LogMeIn would be the perfect candidate for an open source solution as this kind of operation does not have to make public the source code (or even the binaries!) for their special tweaks.