Open source doesn't repeal laws of economics

After failing in its webOS strategy, HP has announced plans to use it to create an open source project. This is an example of what (in our 2006 paper) Scott Gallagher and I called a “spin-out” strategy by firms to find a home for a technology they no longer wish to control.

Some might hope this would be as successful as IBM was with Eclipse. Others compare it to Fedora, the Red Hat desktop variant of its core Linux server product. However, with more than a decade of open source research and consulting, I don’t think it will be successful.

I take HP at their word that they will work with the open source community to set up appropriate licensing and governance. Unlike other firm-sponsored communities, letting go is not likely to be a problem.

However, open source only works when you have enough contributors. WebOS is not desktop Linux. Before a project launches, the best proxies are developer interest and user demand (“scratching your own itch”), and it’s no secret that webOS — although technically sophisticated — was already an also-ran when HP bought it in spring 2010.

The fact that when software has failed as a proprietary technology, it nearly always fails as an open source technology. From my research, I’d say a major reason is timing: firms don’t let go until the technology has clearly failed on the market.

The other problem that the world really only wants (or needs) a single open source product in each category. Eclipse was the first open source tools platform, so that Sun’s subsequent efforts to let go were too late (see #1 above). The BSD variants of Unix predated Linux but were swamped and the Netscape server never caught on against Apache. It doesn’t have to be all that open, as the success of MySQL (and Android) has shown.

(Some would argue that Chrome and Mozilla are an exception to this rule. Perhaps — but the competition is not over yet.)

In fact, with webOS HP seems doomed to repeat history — in this case, Nokia’s failed efforts with open source Symbian. In addition to being late and competing against Android, Symbian began open source life with a raft of problems that caused it to lose its once-dominant market share in the category it created. The prospects for webOS seem similar — except that webOS never had 60% of the global smartphone market.

Does webOS have a chance? Over a decade ago, Shane Greenstein and Tim Bresnahan showed that the only way a new platform succeeded was by identifying an unserved niche (that hopefully became a big market). So if webOS is going to succeed, the answer is the same as a year or two ago: not by competing head-to-head with Android and the iPhone, but serving a market that they’ve ignored. Since HP hasn’t found this market in the past 18 months, I can’t see how open source will change things.

R challenge to proprietary stat software

The NY Times published a glowing story Tuesday (with a follow up blog posting Wednesday) on the success of R, an open source project that has grown to fill most statistical software needs.

R was launched in 1996 as a knockoff of the Bell Labs statistical programming language, S. As with Apache or Perl, much of the value comes from add-on packages, and it has grown a remarkable library of donated packages stored at CRAN, which is modeled on Perl’s CPAN.

I first came across R when running the MacStats website in the late 1990s, and recommended it to fellow academics (interested in stat software and notoriously cheap) back in August 2000.

From an economic or organizational standpoint, R is just a new act of the original open source story: user-innovators solving their own problems. Or, as Eric Raymond observed a decade ago, good software (especially open source software) comes from “scratching a developer's personal itch.” That scratching gave us Project GNU, with programming language compilers, a text editor, and gradually bits and pieces of an operating system.

Once upon a time, statisticians had to write their own Fortran programs to solve their analyses. Even today, most have better math and computer skills than the average college graduate.

So R — as with compilers — had a large pool of potential users who could write their own code. (Unlike, say, those who write children’s edutainment software). Also, university professors have autonomy over use of their time — organizational slack — but often not a lot of discretionary cash. So spending a few days to write a library — rather than buying a $100 or $500 off-the-shelf package — made certain economic sense.

When I was first evaluating R in 2000, the problem was the lack of a GUI. Statistics teachers often could program but undergraduate psych (or business) students could not, nor would they be keen on navigating a line-oriented program.

To make a GUI solution available, R had a Windows version, and started on Mac OS X with an X11 (Unix workstation GUI) implementation. Now it has a native UI version for OS X, in addition to Windows, Linux (4 flavors) and Solaris. It has scientific, social science, probability and domain-specific statistical packages contributed by users. Where once social scientists fought to find any implementation of partial least squares — since Herman Wold, the implementor of the original PLS package, died in 1992 — there are now at least 4 PLS packages available (free) for R.

When I was recommending R back in 2000, it was rough but obviously ambitious in its goals. It’s gratifying to see how it’s evolved to success (and fame), even if it doesn’t teach us anything new about strategies for growing autonomous open source communities.

Don't listen to your partners

Most high tech technical executives know Clay Christensen’s 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma. In it, he argues that under certain codntiions — basically when a high priced product category is supplanted by a commodity product category — it’s dangerous for a firm to listen to its existing customers.

In those cases, the customers will say “give us more of the same” and “no, ignore that cheaper, less capable technology.” This is exactly how mainframe and minicomputer makers underestimated the PC.

Wednesday, at the next-to-last session of the 2008 Academy of Management (my last session before Disneyland), Prof. Allan Afuah offered early results from his study that extends this idea in a new direction: the risk of listening to partners. Allan’s study looked at videogame console makers trying to make a transition across technology generations that requires an architectural innovation (as defined by the famous Henderson & Clark paper on this subject).

For a Wednesday morning session, this was an astonishing turnout — 7 on the program but 17 in the audience. In addition to Allan, there were other interesting papers on innovation topics. The one where I had greatest personal interest was by Oliver Alexy (of Technische Universität München) with his paper on how the announcements of open source revenue models affect stock prices.

Will OSS spinoff beget a spinoff?

The CEO of the Mozilla open source project said Wednesday it is thinking of spinning off its Thunderbird e-mail client so (to put it more bluntly than she did) it doesn’t atrophy due to neglect. Mitchell Baker (realistically) notes that Thunderbird is not getting the attention given how browser-focused the Firefox Mozilla Foundation is.

Of course, everyone knows that Mozilla was created from Netscape when AOL decided it was tired of losing money on browsers. So this would be a spinoff of a spinoff — or perhaps more accurately, a founding of a foundling.

What I found odd (almost shocking) is that Baker (who I’ve met a few times) didn’t mention Eudora or Penelope, the planned Eudora-Thunderbird open source collaboration led by Qualcomm. Penelope has code, engineers and installed base, something Thunderbird badly needs, particularly if it’s about to become a Mozilla foundling.
Is Baker ignoring Penelope due to a bad case of NIH? Does this presage some unannounced Qualcomm-Mozilla Foundation divorce? Did she just happen to forget about the code, engineers, and fanatically loyal users (of which I’m one)? The comments on her blog suggest that the Eudora users didn’t forget, but again Penelope doesn’t rate a mention in her summary of the comments.

Technorati Tags: communities, Eudora, open source, Mozilla

Is LiMo Gated or Open Source?

The use of Linux in mobile phones is one of the big growth areas for embedded Linux. As mobile CPUs got faster and RAM got bigger, the once ludicrous idea of putting Linux on a phone has become feasible. (For those don’t know the players in the mobile OS platform wars, the most detailed (free) analysis can be found in a comprehensive 52-page report by Andreas Constantinou of VisionMobile Ltd.)

Last June, several existing vendors of Linux-based mobile phones (as well as two of the world’s biggest operators) announced an alliance to try to create unified Linux standards. The players were:

• NTT DoCoMo, NEC and Panasonic Mobile Communications, creators of the MOAP-L Linux stack used for some of NTT’s phones. (Other DoCoMo phones use the MOAP-S platform based on the Symbian OS)
• Motorola, the 2nd largest cell phone maker, whose EZX platform is based on code from MontaVista and Trolltech
• Samsung, the 3rd largest cell phone maker
• Vodafone, which as the world’s largest mobile phone operator, would like to sell more commodity handsets

Conspiciously absent was Nokia (the world’s largest handset maker again in 2006), which has released two Linux-based WiFi tablets but (thus far) no Linux GSM phones.

This week, the alliance got a new name and formal structure. The LiMo Foundation has been incorporated in Delaware but is headquartered in England. Aspects of the foundation appear patterned after the Eclipse Foundation, the most successful open source R&D consortium to date.

The Mobile Phone Development blog (where I learned of the new foundation), dug through the documents and found that they suggest the technical scope and architecture for the planned collaboration.

As someone who researches open source governance and communities, I found something else to be even more interesting. The nine-page white paper outlining the Foundation’s goals and structure says:

Membership in the Foundation is open, subject only to the payment of dues while access to the Foundation source code is subject solely to being a Member and compliance with a security-related self-certification and other specified security measures. [Emphasis added]

Unless I misread this, they are creating what Sonali Shah terms a “gated source” community — not an open source community — in which only members inside a “gate” get access to the source code. (Her recently published paper explains more about the concept).

One way to read this is that they made a simple mistake, and they actually intend to share derivative works of the GPL-licensed Linux with the entire world, without fee or membership. After, this is the way that embedded Linux is supposed to work. The other way to read this is that the partners just don’t “get” open source: Motorola has gotten criticism for not sharing EZX changes, while NEC and another Panasonic division were part of the CE Linux Forum, which also had trouble cooperating in an open community.

So far, Nokia has done much better. While Nokia often tries to be a vertically integrated company and push its own standards, on open source (and the 770 and 800), they appear to get it. Another open source research colleague, Sebastian Spaeth of ETH Zürich, is preparing a case study documenting what Nokia did and why.

Technorati Tags: communities, embedded Linux, mobile phones, open source, R&D consortia