Recently, Bryan Richard and Tim O’Reilly proclaimed that GPL has no future in this networked world where software is to be delivered as a service. You can also read Tim’s previous post on the topic here. I am not comfortable with their postions. The software as a service is at very early stages and it is too early to determine how it will play out in the future. I have no doubt that the user data will be residing on the web and the browser will be the main point of entry for the users. The role of the software will either be realigned to work with data on the web (as advocated by proponents of Rich Internet Applications) or completely removed (as advocated by the proponents of purely web based apps). There will definitely be a paradigm shift towards data on the web. Yes, I would prefer to call this shift as data on the web rather than software as a service.

Bryan and Tim, in their arguments against open source licenses in the networked world, seems to have made the following assumptions

• They seem to assume that the software developer and service provider are going to be the same
• They seem to assume that enterprise customers (for that matter, even the ordinary users) are going to subscribe to the services from vendors than implement it on their own.

I don’t see any reason why I should subscribe to a service provider like salesforce.com when I could take corresponding open source web app and host it on my own servers. Let us take the case of wordpress.com, where software is offered as a service (as implied by Tim O’ Reilly and Bryan Richard). The same software, when released under one of the open source licenses, could be used by the user to set up a blog on any server on the internet. While the open source license doesn’t make sense to wordpress.com users, it makes complete sense to users who wants to host the blogs on their own servers. Similarly, the code released under the open source license also allows another party to offer services, similar to wordpress.com, to their customer base. For example, people in India might prefer to have the same wordpress software as a service hosted on the servers in their country, possibly with a brand name that resonates with their nation, culture, interests, etc. I could make the same arguments for other web based applications like word processors, spreadsheets, wikis, etc.

Even though open source licenses doesn’t make any sense to ordinary users who just use the software as a service, they still play a very crucial role in cases similar to what I have mentioned in the above example. There is no way the open source licenses will become irrelevant in the network based future. In my personal blog, I have argued, in a post I made sometime back, that open source is not a business model but a platform on which various economic models play out. I have also argued that open source acts as a great leveler in the markets, ensuring that no single person/company will hold monopoly over other people’s lives. Even in the networked world, open source will play a role similar to what it played in the traditional software world. The users may not want to see the source code when they use the software as a service but open source licenses will ensure that the source code is available for those users who need them for various purposes (including the instances mentioned in the above Wordpress example), thereby offering the same freedom that was available in the traditional software world.

Open source is a philosophy. Open source is a platform. But it was never a business model by itself. Various business models played out on top of the open source platform. This will remain the same even in the data on the web future. It is premature to write obituary for open source licenses.

Tags: opensource, saas, data, web, osi, gpl, gplv3, wordpress