The Cathedral, The Bazaar And The Reseller

Open source software means opportunity.

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
Sm@rt Partner

December 17, 1998

Linus always did it. IBM is doing it. And, now open source software is coming to you. What's a reseller to do? I say embrace it.

Open source software, for those of who are arriving late, is the hottest trend in software development since Java was poured. When you develop in open source, you not only let your users have the source code, you encourage them to develop the code themselves, adopt the successful changes, and re-release the code to all.

Technically, the win here is that with many developers working on a stable programs.

The idea is really very simple. With dozens-or, in the case of Linux, hundreds--of volunteers sifting through the code, problems that usually would hide in the dark are found quickly, their existence trumpeted and just as quickly repaired. For more on how this works, check our Eric S. Raymond's seminal paper, The Cathedral and the Bazaar [ http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar.html ].

Some of you may find that hard to believe. You may think that Linux is the exception to the rule. You couldn't be more wrong. Consider the Internet, it's most popular Web server, Apache, is open source; so is its mail service, sendmail; its main script language, Perl; and even the domain name service, which glues the net together, runs using Bind, which is, yes, open source. We're all open source users whether we realize it or not.

What makes resellers frightened is the idea that if open source continues the way it's been going it will squeeze out commercial software and kill profits. It doesn't help any that some of the most important free software leaders, like hacker extraordinary Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation [ http://www.gnu.org/ ] and the GNU copyleft approach to software, take anti-commercial positions.

While free software purists would argue, I think that both they, and the people, who are frightened by their approach, are confusing the politics of intellectual property rights with the reality of open source software.

Yes, in a world driven by open source software, selling traditional shrink-wrapped software will be harder and prices and thus margins will be lower. I argue, however, that that business model was wrong in the first place.

Selling boxes, whether they contain computers or software, has become a loser's game. The real money for resellers is in service. The old distributor model is based on the idea that software is a product that's not too terribly different from a box of soap. What nonsense!

Yes, there was a time when all you had to do was sell Novell boxes to make money. Even then, the best resellers realized that there was even more cash to be made by managing and administering NetWare.

The lessons are before us. By focusing on service, on exploiting our technical expertise, resellers can do more than make profit, they can grow rich from installing and running open source software.

Want to know more? Then visit The Open Source Page [ http://www.opensource.org/ ] and look to future issues of Sm@rt Reseller as we take some long, hard looks at both open source and its most noticeable success story, Linux.

Copyright 1998