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Misconceptions

There are many misconceptions surrounding Open Source software that can be the source of much confusion.  Many of these misconceptions have, and are being, actively promoted as a business tactic known as Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) because Open Source is increasingly being seen as a challenge to the profit margins of large software corporations. Because of the confusion that can be caused we feel the need to clarify some points:

  • The term "free" is often associated with zero cost and thus is low quality. This may stem from poor experiences with some of the freeware and shareware software available on bulletin board systems (BBS) from the early 1980s. This is not to say that shareware is definitively poor quality, but that the Open Source movement stems from different origins: it is rooted in the academic and engineering communities of the 1960s.
    Much of the internet infrastructure is dependent on technologies that are Open Source, such as the Berkeley Internet Name Daemon (BIND), Sendmail, Apache and Linux. A list of FOSS projects would make heavy reading but a general idea can be gathered from this short list of some more notable examples.
  • Open Source is a new relatively untested way of working. The roots of Open Source development trace back to the early days of computing and the principles of openness and information already shared a core philosophy in scientific and engineering communities. Software engineers were paid for developing the software, rather than paying for the software itself. The Free Software Foundation (and the GNU project) has been in existence since 1984, producing top quality products for over 20 years. The Linux operating system was started in 1991 and quickly became the most widely adopted Open Source project. The term "Open Source" has been around for a lesser time, being coined by a group including Eric Raymond in 1998 to overcome the perceived stigma associated with the word "free".
  • Free software is poor quality. Again, probably by association with the lesser quality BBS software, the intimation is that FOSS is developed by loosely knit associations of home hobbyists. Certainly, from the perspective of the major FOSS projects, this couldn't be further from the truth. Many large corporations, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Novell, Red Hat to name but a few, are committed to open development, taking advantage of the highly skilled developer communities to improve and check software. Many FOSS developers work actively on Open Source projects as their day jobs and there is an enormous community of skilled developers worldwide who are proud to apply their skills to support a diverse range of projects.
  • No-one is paid to develop free software. How will it get written? Rather than profiteering on maximising margins per user license, they sell on services associated with free software. Businesses built on Open Source rely on a different business model for their profit. Some, such as O'Reilly publishers, sell sufficient books to allow them to pay for the development of Perl. Linux distribution companies, for example Red Hat, make money by packaging Linux distributions and associated applications and selling support for its distribution.
  • Open Source is purely derivative. Only proprietary development can innovate.
    While it is true that many Open Source projects have the goal of providing a free alternative to commercially available software, the Open Source communities continuously drive innovation. Tim O'Reilly makes the point that the vast majority of innovation is not happening on the desktop but on the web. Open Source technologies, such as Perl and PHP, are widely used everywhere one looks. Innovative business is built using Open Source.
    With the belated release of Windows Vista, Microsoft launched the slogan "The Wow starts Now". The reception has been somewhat muted as the real Wow seems to lie elsewhere. Those who have come across the Beryl project have almost universally responded with dropped jaws at the next generation capabilities of the Open Source desktop environment.
  • You must give up any intellectual property rights when you use Open Source Software. This is simply not true. You still own copyright. It is true that the Gnu Public Licence (GPL) requires that, if you incorporate code yourself in a GPL application and then release it, the modified code must be under the same terms. There are no restrictions on you reserving your own intellectual property rights under GPL. This is the key to encourage information sharing. Open Source licensing grants you the right to share with no impact on your rights and no obligation to contribute. Naturally it is beneficial to the community if you do find ways of improving the software and contribute your changes, but it is recognised, from a purely practical point of view, that the majority of users simply require a product to achieve a business goal.