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Comparison of open source and closed source

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Free/open-source software – the source availability model used by free and open-source software
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Wikimedia Shop (FOSS) – and closed source are two approaches to the distribution of software.

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1 Background
About Wikipedia
2 Commercialization
Community portal
2.1 Closed-source software
Recent changes
2.2 FOSS
Contact page
2.3 Handling competition
Tools
3 Innovation
What links here
3.1 Code quality
Related changes
4 Business models
Upload file
5 See also
Special pages
Permanent link
6 References

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 Page information
Wikidata item
Cite this page Background [edit]

Print/export Under the closed-source model source code is not released to the public. Closed-source software
Create a book is maintained by a team who produces their product in a compiled-executable state, which is what
Download as PDF the market is allowed access to. Microsoft, the owner and developer of Windows and Microsoft
Printable version
Office, along with other major software companies, have long been proponents of this business
Languages model. Although in August 2010, Microsoft interoperability general manager Jean Paoli said
Edit links
Microsoft "loves open source" and its anti-open-source position was a mistake.[1]

The FOSS model allows for able users to view and modify a product's source code, but most of
such code is not in the public domain. Common advantages cited by proponents for having such a
structure are expressed in terms of trust, acceptance, teamwork and quality.[2]

A non-free license is used to limit what free software movement advocates consider to be the
essential freedoms. A license, whether providing open-source code or not, that does not stipulate
the "four software freedoms",[3] are not considered "free" by the free software movement. A closed
source license is one that limits only the availability of the source code. By contrast a copyleft
license claims to protect the "four software freedoms" by explicitly granting them and then explicitly
prohibiting anyone to redistribute the package or reuse the code in it to make derivative works
without including the same licensing clauses. Some licenses grant the four software freedoms but
allow redistributors to remove them if they wish. Such licenses are sometimes called permissive
software licenses.[4] An example of such a license is the FreeBSD License which allows derivative
software to be distributed as non-free or closed source, as long as they give credit to the original
designers.

A misconception that is often made by proponents of both closed and open-source software is that
open-source software cannot be capitalized.[5] FOSS can and has been commercialized by
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 companies such as Red Hat, Canonical, Mozilla, Google, IBM, Novell, Oracle, VMware and others.

Commercialization [edit]

Closed-source software [edit]

Main articles: Closed-source software and proprietary software

The primary business model for closed-source software involves the use of constraints on what
can be done with the software and the restriction of access to the original source code. This can
result in a form of imposed artificial scarcity on a product that is otherwise very easy to copy and
redistribute. The end result is that an end-user is not actually purchasing software, but purchasing
the right to use the software. To this end, the source code to closed-source software is considered
a trade secret by its manufacturers.

FOSS [edit]
Main article: Business models for open-source software

FOSS methods, on the other hand, typically do not limit the use of software in this fashion. Instead,
the revenue model is based mainly on support services. Red Hat Inc. and Canonical Ltd. are such
companies that give its software away freely, but charge for support services. The source code of
the software is usually given away, and pre-compiled binary software frequently accompanies it for
convenience. As a result, the source code can be freely modified. However, there can be some
license-based restrictions on re-distributing the software. Generally, software can be modified and
re-distributed for free, as long as credit is given to the original manufacturer of the software. In
addition, FOSS can generally be sold commercially, as long as the source-code is provided. There
are a wide variety of free software licenses that define how a program can be used, modified, and
sold commercially (see GPL, LGPL, and BSD-type licenses). FOSS may also be funded through

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donations.
A software philosophy that combines aspects of FOSS and proprietary software is open core
software, or commercial open source software. Despite having received criticism from some
proponents of FOSS,[6] it has exhibited marginal success. Examples of open core software include
MySQL and VirtualBox. The MINIX operating system used to follow this business model, but came
under the full terms of the BSD license after the year 2000.
Handling competition [edit]
This model has proved somewhat successful, as witnessed in the Linux community. There are
numerous GNU/Linux distributions available, but a great many of them are simply modified versions
of some previous version. For example, Fedora Linux, Mandriva Linux, and PCLinuxOS are all
derivatives of an earlier product, Red Hat Linux. In fact, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is itself a
derivative of Fedora Linux. This is an example of one vendor creating a product, allowing a third-
party to modify the software, and then creating a tertiary product based on the modified version.
All of the products listed above are currently produced by software service companies.
Operating systems built on the Linux kernel are available for a wider range of processor
architectures than Microsoft Windows, including PowerPC and SPARC. None of these can match
the sheer popularity of the x86 architecture, nevertheless they do have significant numbers of
users; Windows remains unavailable for these alternative architectures, although there have been
such ports of it in the past.
The most obvious complaint against FOSS revolves around the fact that making money through
some traditional methods, such as the sale of the use of individual copies and patent royalty
payments, is much more difficult and sometimes impractical with FOSS. Moreover, many see[who?]
the introduction of FOSS as damaging to the market for commercial software.[7][8][9] Most software
development companies sell licenses to use individual copies of software as their primary source
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 of income, using a combination of trade secrets and copyright, patent, and trademark laws
(collectively called intellectual property rights laws).[citation needed] Fees from sale and licensing of
commercial software are the primary source of income for companies that sell software.

Open-source software has a large number of alternative funding streams, which are actually
better-connected to the real costs of creating and maintaining software[citation needed]. After all, the
cost of making a copy of a software program is essentially zero, so per-use fees are perhaps
unreasonable. At one time, open-source software development was almost entirely volunteer-
driven, and although this is true for many small projects, many alternative funding streams have
been identified and employed for FOSS:

Give away the program and charge for installation and support (used by many Linux
distributions).
"Commoditize complements": make a product cheaper or free so that people are more likely to
purchase a related product or service you do sell.
Cost avoidance / cost sharing: many developers need a product, so it makes sense to share
development costs (this is the genesis of the X Window System and the Apache web server).
Donations
Crowd funding

Increasingly, FOSS is developed by commercial organizations. In 2004, Andrew Morton noted that
37,000 of the 38,000 recent patches in the Linux kernel were created by developers directly paid
to develop the Linux kernel. Many projects, such as the X Window System and Apache, have had
commercial development as a primary source of improvements since their inception. This trend
has accelerated over time.[citation needed]

There are some[who?] who counter that the commercialization of FOSS is a poorly devised business
model because commercial FOSS companies answer to parties with opposite agendas. On one
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 hand commercial FOSS companies answer to volunteers developers, who are difficult to keep on a
schedule, and on the other hand they answer to shareholders, who are expecting a return on their
investment. Often FOSS development is not on a schedule and therefore it may have an adverse
effect on a commercial FOSS company releasing software on time.[10]

Innovation [edit]

Gary Hamel counters this claim by saying that quantifying who or what is innovative is
impossible.[11]

The implementation of compatible FOSS replacements for proprietary software is encouraged by

the Free Software Foundation to make it possible for their users to use FOSS instead of
proprietary software, for example they have been listed GNU Octave, an API-compatible
replacement for MATLAB, as one of their high priority projects, in the past this list contained free
binary compatible Java and CLI implementations, like GNU Classpath and DotGNU. Thus even
"derivative" developments are important in the opinion of many people from FOSS. However, there
is no quantitative analysis, if FOSS is less innovative than proprietary software, since there are
derivative/reimplementing proprietary developments, too.

Some of the largest well-known FOSS projects are either legacy code (e.g., FreeBSD or Apache)
developed a long time ago independently of the free software movement, or by companies like
Netscape (which open-sourced its code with the hope that they can compete better), or by
companies like MySQL which use FOSS to lure customers for its more expensive licensed product.
However, it is notable that most of these projects have seen major or even complete rewrites (in
the case of the Mozilla and Apache 2 code, for example) and do not contain much of the original
code.

Innovations have come, and continue to come, from the open-source world:

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 GmailFS is a good example of the collaborative nature of much open-source development.
Building on FUSE (which allows filesystems to be implemented in userspace, instead of as code
that needs to be loaded into the kernel) combined with libgmail , which is a Python library for
programmatic access to a user's Gmail message store, the result is the ability to use the
multiple gigabytes of Gmail message space as a fileserver accessible from anywhere on the
Internet.
Perl, the pioneering open-source scripting language, made popular many features, like regular
expressions and associative arrays, that were unusual at the time. The newer Python language
continues this innovation, with features like functional constructs and class-dictionary
unification.
dcraw is an open-source tool for decoding RAW-format images from a variety of digital
cameras, which can produce better images than the closed-source tools provided by the
camera vendors themselves.
A number of laptop models are available with a particular emphasis on multimedia capabilities.
While these invariably come preinstalled with a copy of Microsoft Windows, some of them[12][13]
also offer an alternative "fast-boot" mode (such as Phoenix HyperSpace) based on GNU/Linux.
This gets around the long time it can take to boot up Windows.
VLC media player, Songbird, and Amarok are FOSS music players that integrate internet-
based data sources to an unprecedented degree, taking song information from MusicBrainz,
related track information from last.fm, album cover art from amazon.com and displaying an
artist's Wikipedia page within the player.
While admittedly inspired by Mac OS X's Quartz graphics layer, Compiz Fusion has pioneered
the concept of "plug in" window decorators and animation effects. Users can develop their own
creative and unique effects.
Open-source telecommunication products, such as the Asterisk PBX, have revolutionized the

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ICT industry.[14]
There are substantial efforts towards the implementation of a semantic desktop in FOSS
communities.
Today's desktop environments are innovating regarding their unique idea of a Social Desktop.
Many academic research projects release their results as FOSS.
Code quality [edit]
An analysis of the code of the FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, and Windows operating system kernels
looked for differences between code developed using open-source properties (the first two
kernels) and proprietary code (the other two kernels). The study collected metrics in the areas of
file organization, code structure, code style, the use of the C preprocessor, and data organization.
The aggregate results indicate that across various areas and many different metrics, four systems
developed using open- and closed-source development processes score comparably.[15] The
study mentioned above is refuted by a study conducted by Coverity, Inc finding open source code
to be of better quality.[16]
Business models [edit]
In its 2008 Annual Report, Microsoft stated that FOSS business models challenge its license-
based software model and that the firms who use these business models do not bear the cost for
their software development[clarification needed]. The company also stated in the report:[17][18]
Some of these [open source software] firms may build upon Microsoft ideas that we
provide to them free or at low royalties in connection with our interoperability initiatives.
To the extent open source software gains increasing market acceptance, our sales,
revenue and operating margins may decline.
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 Open source software vendors are devoting considerable efforts to developing software
that mimics the features and functionality of our products, in some cases on the basis
of technical specifications for Microsoft technologies that we make available. In
response to competition, we are developing versions of our products with basic
functionality that are sold at lower prices than the standard versions.

See also [edit]

Linux adoption
Free software portal
GNU Project
Open system
Vendor lock-in
Network effect

References [edit]
1. ^ Microsoft: 'We Love Open Source'
2. ^ The GNU Manifesto – GNU Project – Free Software Foundation (FSF)
3. ^ The Free Software Definition – GNU Project – Free Software Foundation (FSF)
4. ^ Various Licenses and Comments about Them – GNU Project – Free Software Foundation (FSF)
5. ^ Perkins, Greg (1999-08-24). "Open Source and Capitalism" . Slashdot. Archived from the
original on 2000-08-17. Retrieved 2014-02-13.
6. ^ Riehle, Dirk (2009). "The Commercial Open Source Business Model" . "Value Creation in e-
Business Management". Springer Verlag. pp. 18–30.

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 7. ^ "[...] the documents show that while Microsoft may be dismissive of open-source software in
public, it considers it a serious competitor in private." – quote from the "Documents_I_and_II"
subsection of Microsoft Halloween documents leak article (specific version: circa 31 March 2009
(q.v.) Retrieved 2009 – April 27.)
8. ^ The "Halloween VI" document appears to give convincing evidence that Microsoft had their
reasons for trying to argue against the popularity of GNU/Linux and other Free and open-source
software.
9. ^ Bill Gates, in his reply after the public response to his own 1976 Open letter to hobbyists, said
"Unfortunately, some of the companies I have talked to about microcomputer software are reluctant
to have it distributed to the hobbyist, some of whom will steal it, when [...]".
10. ^ Integrating Open Source in Commercial Solutions
11. ^ http://opensource.com/business/11/2/whos-really-innovative
12. ^ Toshiba launches multimedia Qosmio notebooks | InfoWorld | News | 2004-07-22 | By Martyn
Williams, IDG News Service
13. ^ PC World – Acer Readies New Notebook, Tablet PC
14. ^ Open Source in ICT Industry
15. ^ Spinellis, Diomidis (May 2008). "A Tale of Four Kernels" . "ICSE '08: Proceedings of the 30th
International Conference on Software Engineering". Leipzig, Germany: Association for Computing
Machinery. pp. 381–390. doi:10.1145/1368088.1368140 .
16. ^ "Coverity Scan Report Finds Open Source Software Quality Outpaces Proprietary Code for the
First Time" . Retrieved 10 August 2014.
17. ^ Annual Report on Form 10-K
18. ^ Microsoft's annual report: Open-source mental block | The Open Road – The Business and Politics
of Open Source by Matt Asay – CNET News.com

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