The Economics of Commercial Open Source

In the past 20 years, open-source has gone from a small movement to a major force in the software industry. Many mission critical and enterprise operations are now powered by open-source software and its influence on the rise of the Internet is undeniable.

Open source is more than the availability of the source – it is a development philosophy that encourages contribution, transparency and the right to customize software to your specific needs. Open-source is responsible for a lot innovation and progress in software development.

Custom open-source development

Although normally associated with "free", open-source software provides the tools and infrastructure for a significant part of paid professional development in today's industry. I refer to the results of that development as "commercial open-source".

Free and commercial open-source are symbiotic and complement each other, in that it allows for software products and services to emerge that would not have been possible otherwise.

However, despite its incredible value, open-source software often presents significant issues for developers - such as visibility, with many open-source projects going completely unnoticed and their developers' efforts wasted.

Varying quality is also a concern, with amateur developers involved in open-source as often as professional ones. Motivation for continued development and support is a problem area as well, as most people can only devote so much of their time for free.

Those issues often lead to a slow and tedious discovery process when trying to find open-source code that you can use in your project, a process that sometimes will fail to find something useful.

Open-source code as off-the-shelf products

An evolutionary form of software product is becoming widespread - commercial open-source packages that fill the gaps where open-source fails to deliver a good solution.

Custom development can benefit a lot from the availability of ready to use, quality open-source packages. Quoting a post by Matt Legend Gemmell, which said:

As a self-employed software engineer, I understand the value of my time. I not only have an hourly rate, but I also grasp the value of getting ahead of a schedule, or being able to meet an aggressive schedule without having to compromise functionality or vision. The idea of paying others for quality source code is something I find very easy to accept and understand.

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