I don’t agree that open source is a practice. As I mentioned, it is a licensing agreement. True, there are practices that surround open source but that is orthogonal to it’s core definition. And while I’m all for the community defining itself the problem is you then need a definition for the community! After all, the companies that other people don’t think are open source (Microsoft, Google, Oracle, VMWare, etc.) would think that they are in fact part of the open source community hence deserving of having the open source company moniker apply to them.

Like I said, there’s a simple solution here. Open source applies to projects. That makes things much simpler because we can all agree on that.

However, Google is *not* an “open source company” — if I go to them and ask them for the code for their search algorithms so I can contribute to the project, they are unlikely to release it.

This is a fallacy almost exactly of the sort:

Socrates is a man
All men are mortal
Socrates is mortal
ERGO: All men are Socrates

I have to admit, the error is classic, but it is an error.

People have argued that Google supports all sorts of things (degradation of privacy, say) — and they put a great deal of resources into Google Street View, which has been successfully challenged on those grounds — but I don’t think you will be arguing that Google is a privacy deprivation company?

Heinz produces a decent certified organic ketchup, but no one is going to argue that Heinz is a “certified organic company.”

Open Source is not a product, but a practice, and I think this is where your argument gets confused. Like good privacy practices, or acting in a way such that your practices make your products certifiably organic (which involves much more than testing your tomatoes as they are delivered to market!), open source is a web of practices.

Like good privacy practice and *unlike* being certified organic, there isn’t a check-off definition that every party has agreed on to define what open source “certification” might be.

But let that community define itself as it will, I think? For a company to be an “open source company,” open source has to be an *organizing principle* for their work, and by their work I mean their central efforts, preferably *all* their central efforts, not some side project.

Otherwise, they are a conventional company that does some open source work.

Shava Nerad
first publicist for the FSF (“fired” by rms for lack of orthodoxy!)
former executive director of The Tor Project (http://torproject.org), which *is* an open source project
Current CEO of Oddfellow Studios, which plans to do some open source work.

The whole “open source company” debate has devolved into an “I’m more open source than you are” exercise. Again, that’s a marketing effort. But the danger of playing this criteria game is that it obscures the true impact of open source – it is now a pervasive and unavoidable part of the IT landscape.

But the part of your argument I really don’t understand is the “…derives a significant amount of revenue from its open source offering…”. Maybe you can explain how your run your business, but most companies I’ve seen don’t make money directly from an open source project. They make money from services or ancillary products attached to the open source project. Consider the commercial open source company that has a free, community supported, Mozilla (or derived version) licensed product. They make no money from that. Then they have the premium version which is paid for, company supported and has a company-specific proprietary license agreement. Are they an open source company by you’re definition?

I maintain my position – “Open source company” is a marketing moniker. It is being used by a subset of the IT provider community to carve out a niche. It’s purpose is to exclude some companies in order to gain an advantageous position in the minds of their target market.

But from my position as an analyst – a job which requires me to help customers make sound sourcing decisions – the concept of an “open source company” is meaningless when it comes to assessing an organization as a potential supplier.

I think there is a flaw in your original premise. You state that:

“In order for this to be a valid concept there needs to be set of criteria that can unambiguously qualify, or disqualify, an organization from being an open source company?”

There are many adjectives we can apply to companies that everyone accepts, but have just as much ambiguity. “Software company” (is IBM one? is Sun one?), “successful company” (which definition of success) etc.

In your post, you suggest many possible criteria for defining an “open source company” and then discard them all because they are imperfect. Life (and business) are not always this black and white. In pretty much every single Gartner Magic Quadrant, you have to create hard lines in areas that are truly grey. How do you decide which companies are “part of” a particular category? How do you decide which criteria to use to score the companies that you do include. Gartner comes up with criteria (which can never be perfect) and go from there.

Just because there is not a single set of criteria that everyone agrees on doesn’t mean the concept has no validity.

Kim Weins, OpenLogic

1. Who said every open source startup had to be VC-funded (and who said 5-10 M$ was “a small amount of money”) ?

2. When I say “bet the farm”, I say that the company derives a significant amount of revenue from its open source offering (Carlo Daffara said to me on twitter that their definition mandates > 30% of OSS-related revenue), and also that the company would be dramatically different, in terms of mission / vision / values, if it wasn’t doing any open source business.

Oracle is not an open source company (fails both definitions).

Sun was a hardware company, but Sun software division was an open source company (its three major products, Solaris, Java and Glassfish were open source or based on open source projects they were leading).

VMWare is not an open source company, they have zero revenue (AFAIK) based on open source products, and, more importantly, they have a policy regarding software patents that is completely at the opposite of the open source values.

S.

See:

http://www.groundworkopensource.com/blog/?p=141