The following article comes from the Open Source China, Xie Jia author
In 1998, Open Source term was formally proposed in Palo Alto in Silicon Valley, the open source movement began. When we put an event called "Sports", and behind her a certain contains a profound social significance, it represents a social thought.
Began 20 years ago, the Open Source Software Movement is a continuation of the 1980 Free Software Movement, Free Software is not the correct translation of "free software", but "free software."
The core of the free software movement is a group of highly geek spirit of the first-generation Cyberspace Hackers dominated world, in cyberspace they think everyone should have involved the "freedom rights", and pay for expensive software this hinders the freedom, but also hindered the construction of the great network of the world.
Hackers these thoughts pure and rich sense of mission, like in 1620 from the batch of British Puritans sailed on the North American continent, "Mayflower", they define the spirit of the United kernel.
Open source as a productive collaborative model that dramatically improves the economics of two key elements: productivity and efficiency of the distribution of goods.
"Economics" on Wikipedia simple definition:
Economics at The IS OF S. & social at The Factors that Describes that the Determine at The Production's, and Distribution's consumption of Goods and Services.
Economics is a description of the determinants of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services in social sciences.
Open source is not a business model, because whether open source and whether it can generate business income and no causal relationship. We can not bring revenue and Freemium business model simply equated, because you can do Freemium based on closed source.
Open Source is a collaborative model of production, on top of this mode of production can design different business models. From an economic point of speaking, open source bring breakthrough mainly reflected in the "commodity supply-side efficiency of the delivery of" open source software through a collaborative network software can be more efficient production of goods, delivery of software products.
The first layer of meaning collaboration here refers to the level of the developer division of labor and cooperation, in a relatively loose collaborative new network to join the community of contributors to play to their strengths on the basis of previous maximum extent, we do not need to reinventing the wheel it also avoids the whole society reinventing the wheel; the second level of collaboration significance is that the demand side of commodities also participate in them, because usually in a typical open source project, developers are themselves users, this collaboration makes the production process faster response to actual demand, rapid iteration of the available products.
In September last year listed on the NYSE open source data technology company Elastic since its inception in 2013, has accumulated more than time to IPO 3.5 billion times the product download, there are more than 100,000 members in 46 countries, nearly 200 teams of developers. Elastic on the market before 12 months revenue of more than $ 160 million, covering more than 5000 clients, including nearly a third of the world's top 500 enterprises. As an enterprise software company, the growth rate is staggering, behind the power of Open Source.
It should be noted that open source does not apply to all types of goods, open source can only occur on the type of goods the marginal cost is zero, which means that consumers copy of a commodity is almost no costs for producers and words would be no additional cost (but gave up due to the loss of copyright possible profit opportunities).
This also means that the results of the work of producers have the opportunity to be hugely magnified, because the basic principles of economics determines the lower the cost to bring more consumption. Usually such goods can only be a "commodity information" such as software code, design, content creation, etc., it can not be a physical commodity.
On the surface, there is a strong open-source "altruism" color, and even easy to confuse the public, but in fact there is a very clear open source economics rationality is not mere sentiment driven.
When we talk about economics, not necessarily with the "money" related, in essence, we are looking at the motivation of the individual at the time dominated by limited resources, "money" is just a form of incentive. From the point of view of microeconomics open source can help us understand the motivation of individuals and enterprises to participate in the open source economy.
"Microeconomics" on Wikipedia simple definition:
Microeconomics IS A Branch of Economics that studies at The behavior of the Individuals and Firms in Making Decisions regarding at The Limited's Allocation of Resources.
Microeconomics is a branch of economics that studies the behavior of individuals and businesses in determining the allocation of limited resources.
Then, as the most open economy in the core of the engine, power producers from what to what?
Personal code contributors to the open source community is invested time and effort, rather than the means of production, contributors and would not get any direct financial return in most cases, but by participating in the activities of the open source community, contributors will be able to harvest far more than the immediate financial returns.
These include: participate in a career of great significance in, to prove their expertise and gain industry recognition, release their own interests (which in itself is a reward) in the community, at work and even the future of venture capital financing the higher bargaining power (which is actually a direct material reward).
From "Maslow's hierarchy of needs' point of view, the open source community can give back to the community of contributors is unique and huge, direct contact with the fourth level (esteem needs) and fifth level (self-actualization needs). This fact also explains why the open source community to attract top engineers, because the more top engineers there must be more intense demands of self-realization.
Business as a natural profit organization, as a motivation for producers to participate in the open source community contribution is clear.
There are two companies will choose open source, one is behind the open source community, "leading enterprises" open source its core business, such as open MongoDB NoSQL database technology MongoDB, Redis Labs open NoSQL database technology Redis; the other is the "large enterprise "open source its non-core businesses, such as open Google Go language, Twitter open front-end development technologies Bootstrap.
Here we talk about the latter company, which is the case of large enterprises. For such large-scale enterprises, the most direct motivation for open source is the "talent acquisition" software engineer is a natural sense of identity groups for open-source, open-source project can help companies to recruit or retain top engineers in the field, At the same time, through multiple open source projects, engineers also will help companies build brand culture, attracting more talented engineers.
There is also the kind of large-scale enterprises, strategic layout, with competitors to grab market share by revenue, such as open-source Android by Google to compete with Apple mobile market, through the open-source Chrome browser market to compete with Microsoft, or the technical standards defined industry such as Google open container technology Kubernetes, these strategic actions crucial to the success of large enterprise business ecosystem as a whole.
In addition, although a leading enterprises not an open source project, but will be an endless stream of human and financial resources to invest for an open source community to participate in the open source community, such as Intel and Red Hat 25-year collaboration, Intel's motivation is through investment in Red Hat software system to help him to better sell their own hardware products, but also is a strategic investment.
In the open source world, the open-source community of "people" is the most important factor, lost power producers, the superstructure will be out of the question open source world, which is why the business community open source community is so important reason. Open source is not a business model, but it does open source software can help certain categories established business a competitive advantage in the market.
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