"If you have the right attitude, interesting things will find you."
— Eric Raymond
Recently, open source has been very lively, from the GOTC conference, the Open Atom Global Open Source Summit, to the 18th COPU Open Source China Open Source World Summit Forum, one conference after another. It is expected that there will be a series of open source conferences in the second half of the year, which will be enough to keep open source people from all walks of life enjoying it.
Behind these excitement, we can see both the country's emphasis on open source strategy and the attention of all walks of life to open source. For the open source people who have been working silently for a long time, it is undoubtedly a good thing. However, with the gradual diversification of interested parties involved in open source, various phenomena have also continued to increase, which has begun to make some pure open source people feel at a loss.
In this regard, a teacher told a story in Lu Xun's "The True Story of Ah Q". Ah Q, who has been oppressed all the time, saw that the city's masters were terrified of the arrival of the revolutionary party, and thought that he would You can join the Revolutionary Party, so that you can take the lives of those who have been bullying him in Geweizhuang, and who are called "birds and men and women" by him at the same time. Unexpectedly, when he took to the streets under the banner of revolution, he suddenly found that Zhao Xiucai and the fake foreign devils who bullied him had already claimed to be a revolutionary party before him, so his dream was completely dashed.
It is actually inappropriate to use this story as a metaphor for current open source, and I do not intend to use this story as a metaphor or criticism. But this story tells us that the world is not as simple as Ah Q thought. The development of open source today is not as simple as it was at the beginning. Open source has been given more meaning by the times.
In the seemingly open source spring, there are no flowers everywhere. A fact that cannot be ignored is that, except for those individuals, community teams, and start-up companies that have received policy support, capital blessings, or are backed by large technology companies with strong economic strength, they are working hard to promote or engage in open source business. In the current open source, most of them are not living as they wish, and their business is not booming as imagined. China's open source companies, not to mention that none of them have reached the scale of listing, but judging from the fact that the founders of those star open source companies that are sought after by capital have been going overseas for a long time to expand their business this year, this may be the case. It is related to their corporate strategy, but it seems to be secretly telling the embarrassment of slow business progress in the Chinese market.
In fact, the various challenges facing the sustainable development of open source in China are quite realistic and severe, whether it is at the macro or micro level, whether it is from the perspective of enterprises or the market.
Geographer Hu Huanyong once studied my country's population and agricultural issues from the perspective of man-land relationship, and proposed a population and economic horizontal line called the Hu Huanyong line, which actually coincides with the 400 mm isoprecipitation line. Nearly 94% of my country's population and more than 95% of China's total GDP are distributed on the east side of the Hu Huanyong Line. It can be seen that in the era of agricultural economy, rainfall determines the growth of crops to a large extent, and thus determines the level of regional economic development. In the era of industrial economy, due to machines, energy and raw materials are the factors of production. The supply capacity of energy and raw materials determines the difference in regional economy, so port cities with sufficient energy and raw material supply or convenient transportation become regions with developed industrial economy.
Today, our society has entered the era of digital economy, and codes, data and algorithms have become new factors of production. Well, we seem to be able to make a bold assertion like this: the amount of code output and ownership, the amount of data output per unit area and unit time, and the level of algorithms and computing power in a region determine the development level of the digital economy in the region.
From the macro level of the market, open source, as the infrastructure of the digital economy, can greatly promote the development of the digital economy . It will also be extremely dependent on the level of development of the digital economy.
Therefore, we must objectively realize that although the open source ecology is a universal ecology used by the whole society, due to the imbalance in the development level of the digital economy in various regions, when promoting open source, we must also consider the development level of the digital economy in the region. Decide on the pace of promotion and development of open source, not blindly one size fits all.
According to the "Digital Cooperation Roadmap" report released by the United Nations in 2020, open source software is not only open and free code, but also defined as one of the forms of digital public goods (Digital Public Goods, DPG). The open source software belonging to the digital public product is provided free of charge by the owner of the software property right under the protection of intellectual property rights, and is shared and shared by all parties in the society, and the process of collaborative production.
Since open source software is a digital public good, it inherently has its social and government attributes. From a social perspective, open source should be advocated and encouraged to become a social responsibility of enterprises, especially for powerful and capable technology companies, open source is to contribute to the sustainable development of society. From the government level, appropriate and timely policy intervention will become a necessity, especially at the policy level, how to establish more effective training and incentives for open source talents, as well as related industry support policies to promote the development of open source. Compliance management and other regulatory systems incorporated into certain government regulations will become an unavoidable problem for government norms and policy makers.
For enterprises, trying to monetize open source business is a more complicated and lengthy process than traditional software business. The realization path from open source to business is as follows: open source project -> community operation -> commercial product development -> marketing -> customer income , while the business path of traditional software-based enterprises is: commercial product development -> marketing -> customer income . We can see from the above path that a software business that started from open source actually adds a period of open source project operation out of thin air compared to traditional software business, and this not only increases the cost of economic investment for the founders and their teams Burdens and challenges are enormous. The challenge is not only because of the longer path, but also because community operations and business operations belong to two completely different cultures and values. The open source community focuses on the open network homogeneous culture of peer-to-peer communication, while enterprise management focuses on the hierarchical execution efficiency of the team under the differential order structure. If a team wants to do a good job in the community operation and enterprise operation of open source projects at the same time, the project management team needs to have a schizophrenic thinking mode, and it is also a management art that delicately balances openness and closure.
When open source is oriented to the enterprise-level market, because the enterprise-level 2B industry market is not as good as the consumer-level 2C industry market, once the direction is clear, as long as a large amount of capital is invested quickly, a huge market can be quickly created. The long decision-making chain of enterprise-level market purchases and the complexity of business needs, as well as industry know-hows that are compatible with products, often require a longer period of cultivation, which is precisely what pure money cannot quickly produce.
This situation is not only in China, but also in the US market. The author made a rough count of the American open source companies listed on the market in recent years, such as Gitlab, Confluent, HashiCorp and other star open source companies. From the change chart of the stock prices of several companies from listing to today, we can see that all of them have experienced a cliff-like decline in stock prices and the return of company value to performance.
A new business model is a value discovery or value reconstruction. According to Eric Raymond's conclusion in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", open source is the suppression of the sales value of software as a license, and the real development of open source is the discovery of service value under the value of software as a use. If we go in-depth analysis of the 10 standards defined by OSI ("Open Source Software Promotion Alliance") for open source licenses, one conclusion we can draw is that the provisions of OSI open source licenses are designed to allow open source software to be used directly. The sales value is set to zero. In other words, to meet the standards required by OSI, the direct sales value of the software must be eliminated. Therefore, no matter how many business models can be defined under open source, one of the constant core keys is to use open source code as the basis of service charges, instead of selling software as a product.
However, after 30 years of development of the software industry in China, the value of software as a service industry is still not fully recognized. This is really an unfortunate fact. Even today, we can easily see this reality by searching the bidding announcements of software and services released by domestic demanders on the Internet: Those demanders often require software suppliers to include in the software they provide. It includes free maintenance services ranging from one year to as many as three years, or even longer to five years. The software provider participating in the bidding may be able to opportunistically convert these services into the software quotation, but it cannot change a stubborn logic of Party A's enterprise, that is, the software can be charged, but the service needs to be free. The cognition of Party A’s enterprise is completely contrary to the service-based charging logic under the open source business model.
Furthermore, parties new to open source have insufficient understanding of open source, especially a large number of open source consumers from traditional industries have insufficient understanding of the strategic value and usage paths of open source. In the previous open source circle, developers and enthusiasts of open source code gathered more, as well as large technology companies that obtained the dividends of open source in the early stage. However, a large number of traditional Party A enterprise users who are worth consuming open source in China, as well as traditional closed source software providers and technical service providers, are far from realizing the importance of open source for their own business impact. In the early stage, we encountered such a case in the special course "Enterprise Open Source Governance Manager" . After participating in our training, the founder of a traditional closed source software product company realized the importance of open source compliance. Therefore, he specially found an open source license compliance expert through us to conduct a paid evaluation of his software products, only to suddenly find that the software products he had always thought were completely independently developed by them and developed as their core business for many years were actually used. There are as many as 22 open source components, involving multiple different open source licenses, and even several highly contagious GPL open source licenses. This time, he broke out in a cold sweat. Afterwards he said, "Fortunately, I was able to discover these problems in time when my company did not grow. Otherwise, if it grows bigger, I will be sued by others because the use of open source is not compliant. Wouldn't it be a huge loss?"
In fact, such a situation is by no means an isolated case. In the future, these traditional consumers of open source will be the mass base of open source in China, and helping them establish a correct understanding of open source will also be the basis for the sustainable development of open source in China.
Another point is that the immaturity of the open source industry ecological chain is also a major obstacle to the development of the current open source industry. The traditional software industry chain generally starts from the original software manufacturer, the distribution, agent or sales partner of the software sales end, the value-added agent service provider of the software server, the consulting solution service provider, the technology development support service provider, and finally the end user. The ecology of the entire industry chain relatively complete. The success of a software company depends not only on the technology itself, but also on the integrity and maturity of its industrial ecological chain construction. We can see this at a glance from the past successes of software giants such as SAP and Oracle. . Although the rise of the Internet and SAAS services has changed various roles in the software industry ecological chain, it is difficult for a software industry without an industrial ecological chain to achieve real success. The same is true for open source.
To sum up, compared with the relatively simple social significance of open source code sharing originally contained in open source, the current open source we are facing is no longer a simple technology development method, nor is it a simple business strategy. It has become an important infrastructure of the digital economy. Open source, as a strategic choice for China's technological development, is already the key to China's future digital economic development. Therefore, how to correctly understand and properly participate in open source is a problem worthy of consideration and attention by all parties.
Reprinted from丨OpenTEKr Open Source Galaxy
Editor丨Weng Peipei
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Introduction to Kaiyuanshe
Founded in 2014, Kaiyuan Society is composed of individual members who voluntarily contribute to the cause of open source. It is formed according to the principle of "contribution, consensus, and co-governance". It has always maintained the characteristics of vendor neutrality, public welfare, and non-profit. International integration, community development, project incubation" is an open source community federation with the mission. Kaiyuanshe actively cooperates closely with communities, enterprises and government-related units that support open source. With the vision of "Based in China and Contributing to the World", it aims to create a healthy and sustainable open source ecosystem and promote China's open source community to become an active force in the global open source system. Participation and Contributors.
In 2017, Kaiyuanshe was transformed into an organization composed entirely of individual members, operating with reference to the governance model of top international open source foundations such as ASF. In the past nine years, it has connected tens of thousands of open source people, gathered thousands of community members and volunteers, hundreds of lecturers at home and abroad, and cooperated with hundreds of sponsors, media, and community partners.
