gmiller - 4:07 am on Mar 25, 2001 (gmt 0)

Well, there really isn't one movement here:

There's the "Free Software" movement led by Stallman. Stallman believes it's immoral to demand money in exchange for your work (and place restrictions on it in order to enforce that) if and only if you write software. In any other industry, it's fine.

There's the "Open Source" movement led by Eric S. Raymond. ESR believes that groups of companies working together and with their users can develop stronger business models than companies keeping things to themselves.

And then there are the "Software for free" people. Linus Tovalds (creator of Linux) seems to fall into this category, as do the high school kids that post to SlashDot. This is all about not having to spend money on stuff.

I've been thinking quite a bit about where Open Source succeeds and where it doesn't seem to make much difference. I've come up with these criteria for the success stories:

(1) They're all too big for one person to roll his own. Otherwise, who needs external contributors? That's why you get thousands of .mp3 players with the same features rather than one big one that dominates all the others.

(2) They're not terribly difficult software. If contributors needed mountains of knowledge in order to help, few people would be able to help. That's why GNU Go can't hold its own against many of the commercial Go-playing AIs.

(3) They're widely needed. If only a few people need the software, they won't be able to get a very big group to work on the project.

So Apache and Linux have done well, and I tend to believe Mozilla, ReactOS, PostgreSQL, and MySQL will eventually achieve critical mass and swamp commercial competitors.