Once again, DevOps is moving the needle. This time, it’s in the open source world, and both open source and commercial software may never be the same again.

As more and more open source projects have become not only successful, but vital to the individual and organizations that use them, the open source world has begun to receive some (occasionally grudging) respect from commercial software developers. And as commercial developers have become increasingly dependent on open source tools, they have begun to take the open source process itself more seriously.

Today some large corporations have begun to actively participate in the open source world, not merely as users, but as developers of open source projects. SAP, for example, has a variety of projects on github, and Capital One has just launched its open source Hygeia project, also on github.

Why would large, corporate, and commercial software developers place their code in open source repositories? Needless to say, they’re making only a limited number of projects available as open source, but for companies used to treating their proprietary source code as a valuable asset that needs to be closely guarded, even limited open source exposure is a remarkable concession. It’s reasonable to assume that they see significant value in the move. What kind of payoff are they looking for?

• Hiring. The open source community is one of the largest and most accessible pools of programming talent in software history, and a high percentage of the most capable participants are underemployed by traditional standards. Posting an attractive-looking set of open source projects is an easy way to lure new recruits. It allows potential employees to get their feet wet without making any commitments (on either end), and it says, “Hey, we’re a casual, relaxed open source company — working for us will be just like what you’re doing now, only you’ll be making more money!”
• Recognition. It’s an easy way to recognize employees who have made a contribution — post a (non-essential) project that they’ve worked on, giving them credit for their work. It’s cheaper than a bonus (or even a trophy), and the recognition that employees receive is considerably more public and lasting than a corporate award ceremony.

Development of open source as a resource. Large corporations are already major users and sponsors of open-source software, often with direct involvement at the foundation level. By entering the open source world as active contributors, they are positioning themselves to exert even greater influence on its course of development by engaging the open source community on the ground.

Behind the direct move into open source is also the recognition that the basic model of the software industry has largely shifted from selling products, which by their nature are at least somewhat proprietary, to selling services, where the unique value of what is being sold depends much more on the specific combination of services being provided, along with the interactions between the vendor and the customer.

The backend code at a website can all be generic; the “brand” — the combination of look-and-feel, services provided, name recognition, and trademarks — is the only thing that really needs to be proprietary. And even when other providers manage to successfully clone a brand, they may come up short, as Facebook’s would-be competitors have discovered.

Facebook is an instructive example, because (even though its backend code is unique and largely proprietary) the unique service which it provides, and which gives it its value, is the community of users — something that by its nature isn’t proprietary. In the service model, the uniqueness of tools becomes less and less important. In a world where all services used the same basic set of tools, individual service providers could and would still distinguish themselves based on the combinations of services that they offered and the intangibles associated with those services.

This doesn’t mean that the source code for SAP’s core applications is about to become worthless, of course. Its value is intimately tied to SAP’s brand, its reputation, its services, and perhaps more than anything, to the accumulated expertise, knowledge, and experience which SAP possesses at the organizational level. As with Facebook, it would be much easier to clone any of SAP’s applications than it would be to clone these intangibles.

But the shift to services does mean that for large corporate developers like SAP, placing the code for new projects (particularly for auxiliary software not closely tied to their core applications) in an open source repository may be a reasonable option. The boundary between proprietary and open source software is no longer the boundary between worlds, or between commercial developers and open source foundations. It is now more of a thin line between proprietary and open source applications (or components, or even code snippets) on an individual basis, and very possibly operating within the same environment.

For current and future software developers, this does present a challenge, but one which is manageable: to recast themselves not as creators of unique source code, or even as developers of unique applications, but rather as providers of unique packages of applications and services. These packages may include both proprietary and open source elements, but their value will lie in what they offer the user as a package much more than it lies in the intellectual property rights status of the components. This kind of packaging has always been smart business, and the most successful software vendors have always made good use of it. We are rapidly entering a time when it may be the only way to do business.

About the Author

Michael Churchman started as a scriptwriter, editor, and producer during the anything-goes early years of the game industry, working on the prototype for the ground-breaking laser-disc game Dragon’s Lair. He spent much of the 90s in the high-pressure bundled software industry, where near-continuous release cycles and automated deployment were already de facto standards; during that time he developed a semi-automated system for managing localization in over fifteen languages. For the past ten years, he has been involved in the analysis of software development processes and related engineering management issues.