Media must expose false OS vendors

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Geneva, 17 May 2007

Much that passes for open source software is in fact disguised marketing, and the media has a role in exposing the guilty, says Progress Software enterprise infrastructure division CTO Hub Vandervoort.

Speaking on the sidelines of an SOA conference, near the Swiss frontier in Divonne-les-Bains, France, Vandervoort describes the community editions of several software products as cynical seeding strategies. "You, the media, must help people understand what open source, community editions and seeding are. It is easy to confuse them and vendors should be held to account," he says.

The question is whether open source is indeed the altruistic idea it started out as, he says. "I would think if there was no great innovation left in software then probably it would need to become that [altruistic]. But as long as there is room for innovation then entrepreneurs and capitalists will rule and they will continue to extract value for their innovation as long as they can."

Something is not an open source project just because the code is in the open, Vandervoort adds. "What I'm seeing and what many people are starting to tell me is that the open source business models that are out there, namely the Red Hats, are not really proving to offer the kind of value that they are charging for.

"What are the viable business models? I don't see any," says Vandervoort. "There are those that question whether Red Hat will be durable for another decade. For the most part, open source has proven to be a seeding strategy for most companies who use it as a springboard to sell their enterprise edition," he says.

Open source, Vandervoort says, can be used in a non-profit manner to create standards that allow for further innovation. "This is not a business model; but a way to opportunity for all," he says. "I'm not anti-open source, but I have difficulty seeing how I can make money off it.

"Personally, I like the community-edition approach where, rather than making it open source, vendors make a community edition available; a free light-weight edition that has the same springboard potential, but it doesn't create the complexity around IP [intellectual property] rights management," Vandervoort says.

Explaining the public sectors' liking for open source, Vandervoort says governments like the idea "because they don't like paying royalties and licence fees". But this does not mean they are getting value, he concludes.