The End of Open Source? . . . The Beginning of Open Services
The rise of the ‘network as the computer’, web 2.0, and social software architectures – enabling wide scale interactions between individuals – necessitates asking new ethical, economic and legal questions. Tim O’Reilly, who coined the term web 2.0, recently called for a revision of the Open Source definition: “We need a set of guidelines for open services that is as thoughtful and provocative as the original open source definition”. He makes a crucial point. If people and their data are at the heart of web 2.0, we need to discuss the limits of “openness”. If social activity has become an economic product in its own right, do we need distributed ownership and investment structures? What are the ethics that make community driven sites sustainable?
In recent times, new web sites have emerged that are fueled uniquely by their users; the content they upload, their links, their tags, their social networks. While these developments have brought the web to a whole new level (a 2.0 release), we at OpenBusiness have been thinking more and more about the implications for being “open”. Because users are at the center of Web 2.0, the core of these new services consists of only two major pieces: their data first and foremost and, secondly, a robust architecture that centralizes and “harvests” it.
While providing a platform for user interaction such as de.licio.us or flickr is the basis of these services they are nothing without their users. In this environment technology is no longer the primary asset; instead, it really is the data, the size of the network, the terabytes of bandwidth served, that bring a service to everyone’s attention. This leads to the question of whether new forms of distributed ownership and investment should be tinkered with. Is it right and sustainable that “enabling shells” such as flickr, YouTube or digg are owned by one big company?
The question of “ownership” and principles of openness has been discussed widely in the area of Open Source and Free Software. Fine distinctions have emerged between being merely “open” and being “free” (not as in free beer). What are the obligations of providers of open services? Is it enough to open your APIs, to allow users and other web sites to access and repurpose the data? What are the limits of this interpretation of openness? Do we need a more robust interpretation?
At OpenBusiness, we’d like to explore this discussion as a means of creating a meaningful and sustainable definition of “open services”, much like a meaningful definition of “open-source software” emerged. If Facebook had been sold to Yahoo for $900 million dollars, as was widely rumored, each user’s profile would have been worth $90 dollars. Although there was no Facebook deal, the web has already seen many similar ones (Skype, MySpace, Delicious, Flickr) that raise the same basic question: what are the principles for relying on users to build a money-generating business? Or, in more provocative terms, when does user-generated content – at $90 per screen name – become a new form of exploitation? Alternatively, one could argue that users are compensated with a good; a “free” service in return for their data and attention.
What are the necessary tenets of this new class of software and software company? What is the difference between “open”, “free”, and “commercial” – and how do they interact?
12 Responses to “The End of Open Source? . . . The Beginning of Open Services”
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[...] http://www.openbusiness.cc/2006/10/11/the-end-of-open-source-%e2%80%93-the-beginning-of-open-services/ [...]
Lessig’s distinction between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ sharing would seem to be a criteria for ‘open-services’.
“A “true sharing” site doesn’t try to exercise ultimate control over the content it serves. It permits, in other words, content to move as users choose.
A “fake sharing” site, by contrast, gives you tools to make seem as if there’s sharing, but in fact, all the tools drive traffic and control back to a single site. ”
http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003570.shtml
[...] GooTube might appear to be the beating heart of the Web 2.0 revolution, but well-informed bloggers suggest they’re faking, and in fact driving us all towards Bubble 2.0. This debate echoes recent OB discussions, particularly Christian’s recent provocative but insightful post on Open Services. Looking further back we had a great thread seeking to define ‘What is an Open Business’. [...]
[...] This relates to the need to define Open Services: [...]
On this matter as I see it, there is what would be ideal (from the theoritical point of view) and then there is economic reality.
We have gotten used to get all services for free, thank you Google and co for my email, calendar, text editor, web pages, blog, forums, photo+audio+video storage etc… This is great and it does cost money (lots of money if you look at how much YouTube was pouring down the tube every month). And while it would be nice to have truly open services, something where the company that owns the infrastructure behaves ethically (The famous Google “do no evil”), then I think that the fake open is a good compromise if it can keep the model sustainable.
It is the same concept as for open source: you get the code, but the experts who built it or improved it get paid to support you using it. Nothing is really free, just easier to access even if you do not have a large budget but lots of time instead. For Open Service, you get the service, but you agree that the content will be on that one website so that they can benefit from the mass effect to get some revenue from somewhere. After all we are talking Infrastructure, this is a better alternative than having the government provide it (and charge us taxes for the service).
My concern is actually that we are not even sure that this model is completely sustainable for the long term. YouTube was said to be loosing money all the way to the day they got acquired. Google is getting so big that they may end up imploding: just think of the payroll they carry for example, how much innovation can you sustain with such a big organization? Could it be why Google Video did not really take off (too much friction internally) and why they had to buy YouTube instead to keep the motion going?
A solid underlying infrastructure is healthy, having large companies to take care of it is ok: we have today at least 3 big players to keep the competition going (MSFT, Yahoo, Google). And it may come a time when P2P technology will allow us to get the same infrastructure from home computers all connected together and sharing resources (a la Skype for example). But even then we will have to figure a way to pay for these computers and these connections. There is no such thing as a free lunch…
Having said this, I am also sure that the day people really want to edit the content that is available and the issue of licensing is clear enough (a whole other subject) that they can do so without problem, then it will be easy for a GooTube to add functionality to let users do this. And if they want to keep their audience they will probably do it too, because somebody else could offer the option and attract users away from them.
The key to an healthy ecosystem is the balance between the investors who want to see some return on their investment, the users who want the service and the company employees who want a salary for their work. A good guideline for Open Services should take this into account. Assuming this, Open Services do not have to be about users doing what they want with their content, but about the communication between the 3 groups (investors, employees and users) and keeping sure it is open enough that all can function together with minimum or no friction.
[...] Below is mdanger’s excellent response to our earlier post on Open Services. [...]
[...] OpenBusiness » Blog Archive » The End of Open Source? . . . The Beginning of Open Services (tags: OpenSourceBusiness) [...]
Implications of the Web on Free and Open Source Licenses…
The notion of “software as service” is challenging the concept of software similarly to the way today’s global economy is challenging the concept of being a company.
As bizarre as it might sound, Japanese brand are often manufactured …
[...] The Time Magazine has an extremly relevant article for todays user driven, social, free and open world: is there a new form of exploitation looming? Should those who drive sites like flickr, digg or make an OS poject work not have some ownership it…Openbusiness discussed this earlier here. And here is an excerpt of the Time Magazine article: It might seem very odd to look to a long-dead Russian anarchist for business advice. But Peter Kropotkin’s big idea–that there are important human motivations beyond what he called “reckless individualism”–is very relevant these days. That’s because one of the most interesting questions in business has become how much work people will do for free. [...]
[...] An earlier oct 2006 Open Business.cc blog post also discussed the open quesitons surrounding this: [...]
IMHO, it must be a top priority for Open Business strategies to find ways to reward the ‘productive peers’ contributing to the value generated in and by a system. Otherwise web generated content will always be second priority and second quality to what is being generated by full time jobs in the industrial economy. In other words, it will become a distinctly competitious disadvantage, however efficient the networks and however “free” the services in themselves will be.
A bankable reward channeled back to the peers contributing value is not a great problem technically. What is needed, is ways and methods of evaluating what value is being contributed by who, and how it translates into an economic reward. Is this value/who relationship possible at all to evaluate, given “long tail” dynamics, which can give even seemingly insignificant items in terms of “hit” qualities or number of views an economic importance?
It may be, if you can narrow the evaluation down to a share ratio equivalent to the ones found in p2p filesharing systems. Then it becomes theoretically possible to determine what value is being given to the network, if not qualitatively, then in quantity. And if you adjust the rewards given to a >1 share ratio versus the bill issued to a
[...] This relates to an earlier discussion O’Reilly kicked off, but which went nowwhere: if web 2.0 relies on users creating networks of meaning (through aggregating data) who owns this data. See our earlier discussion. Call me naive, but if Open API’s only exist to give big companies ‘free innovations’, then that’s certainly not in the spirit of Free Software. Here the O’Reilly Post: [...]