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What Hurts Them Helps Us: How Open Source Benefits from the Bad

I noted with interest today that Argentina may become the first country in the world to require all government offices to use open source software. The nation's congress is currently evaluating a bill that would mandate that. This follows several other recent proposed mandates to get entire governments, or large branches of them, to go open source. The U.S. Navy recently announced an open standards only initiative, Australia is seeking to break U.S. software "lock-in" with open source and more. In Argentina's case, the prompt toward open source is driven by rampant piracy. And there's the rub: Just as a recession may bode very well for open source, negative trends in the software industry and in the economy can be big ballast for OSS.

It may seem almost ghoul-like to suggest that that which hurts the software industry as a whole can strongly benefit open source, but evidence is mounting that that's true. In a recent visit to India, Rich Green, Sun Microsystems' executive vice president of software said: "During an economic slowdown, not everything slows down [and] IT projects will continue to be undertaken, but IT budgets will be reduced." He also noted that lower cost options, including open source, would get a boost.

There's more on the "what hurts them helps us" front. In Argentina, a bill mandating that all government offices use open source software is being aggressively pushed by representative Marcelo Dragan. It's part of a broad move to fight rampant piracy in the South American country. In Argentina, more than 60 percent of software programs in use are illegal, costing the software industry more than $200 million a year, in a reference on Argentina Discovery citing data from trade association Software Legal. The rate of piracy is even higher in parts of Malysia and other areas.

In the cases of Australia's and the U.S. Navy's moves to mandate open source software usage, the main driver is the same: fear of being locked in by proprietary platforms. One can even take to an extreme the argument that many negative industry developments pertaining to single, proprietary software products benefit OSS.

For example, check out Tom Raftery's interesting post from a while back where he cites PC Magazine columnist John Dvorak calling for Microsoft to make Internet Explorer completely open source. He quotes Dvorak on this: "All of Microsoft’s Internet-era public-relations and legal problems (in some way or another) stem from Internet Explorer."

Raftery points out that if IE were open source, Microsoft would benefit from better bug patching, and more. Dvorak's argument is simply that Microsoft could replace an Achilles' heel with a strength. There's yet another example of how problems with proprietary software can lead to boosts for open source.

Do you think other negative economic and industry trends bode well for open source?

• Microsoft
• Internet Explorer
• Sun Microsystems

by David H. on Nov. 18, 2008

It depends on how you look at it and also, the situation will vary from organization to organization, as well as from person to person. The above article makes a fair point about certain organization's reasons for switching to and even mandating the use of open source software, but there are other ways to look at that big picture.

1a. People are forced from their once prosperous IT / computer engineering positions and find themselves with a window of opportunity to start or contribute to an open source project that they've had their eyes on.

1b. After being laid off from their jobs, open source-friendly developers will have to spend more time feeling out the job market and will hence, have less time to contribute to the open source project(s) they once held in high priority.

It will happen both ways. To say that the economic panic of today will "help open source" is the sort of generalization that the media typically likes to fling about. To respond with another generalization, though some things may move about, nothing in the long run will change. Microsoft will still somehow net a steadier-than-expected profit and open source will still manage to hang on through it all.

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