Software revolutionaries get a haircut

The ponytails have been in short supply at the annual LinuxWorld bash in San Francisco this week. Chris DiBona from Google sported one of the few, as if to reinforce the fact that one of the richest software companies in Silicon Valley remains studiously anti-establishment. Surrounded by trimmer figures in suits, he looked decidedly out of place, a throwback to the Valley's mythical days of late-night coding, libertarian politics and take-out pizza.

Something has happened to the open-source software movement. It is losing some of the intellectual purity that first drew in the ponytail crowd. It is being subverted to the interests of bigger technology companies - something that makes the idealists who created the movement angry and perturbs the romantics who like to see in it proof that individual human ingenuity can still outsmart faceless corporate power. That, though, is the wrong reaction. In fact, merging with the corporate mainstream is the logical next step. It signals the success of open-source pioneers in reshaping the software landscape, not the end of a dream.

Open-source is a collection of methods for creating and distributing software that exposes the inefficiency in some parts of the traditional commercial industry. The idealism that has surrounded this movement has always masked some harder-edged economic realities, which explains why it can be absorbed into the mainstream with relative ease. Every software company worth its salt already has some open-source strategy. IBM may have set the pace with its early support of Linux but it has become common for all tech companies to release open-source versions of software that does not earn its keep: what better way to undermine a more successful rival? Sun, the biggest victim of the rise of Linux, has belatedly moved to release the source code for its own operating system.

Most commercial software released this way still comes with strings attached, as the owners try to grab the benefits of open-source (a bigger pool of largely volunteer developers to draw on, more users drawn by the "free" distribution and the chance to alter the software themselves) without giving up full control or all the economic benefit. That has led to a proliferation of different open-source software licences - more than 60 at the last count, according to the Open-Source Development Labs, an industry group.

Corporate spin doctors have devised new descriptions for these watered-down flavours of open source. Labels such as "shared source" and "community source" have been slapped on ways of developing or distributing software that sometimes borrow only marginally from the original ideal. They are denounced as perversions. To complain about these approaches, however, is to miss the point. Anything that speeds the adoption of a technology by giving users more control should add to the general good - even as it threatens the business models of the weaker developers, forcing a more efficient allocation of software development resources.

In fact, the conflict between the ponytails and the suits was never as strong as is perceived. For many software developers, contributing software to an open-source project is an act of self-help: the wider community can create something that no developers working alone or in small groups can. Most developers work in the IT departments of big companies, writing code for their employers: pooling those efforts with others is a more efficient way of building software. If linking developers this way also serves to disintermediate the big commercial software companies, so much the better. That makes it well suited to these post-bubble times, when power in the tech business has shifted from suppliers to buyers.

Even the most successful tech businesses are borrowing ideas from the open-source world. One of the brightest stars in an otherwise gloomy software universe is VMWare, which makes virtualisation software (it turns a single server into several "virtual" machines running different programs at the same time, which lets companies make better use of their computing resources).

VMWare, which is owned by storage maker EMC, is growing at more than 90 per cent a year. But in the new reality of the software industry, even a successful business like this risks getting caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. The devil, in the form of Microsoft, is preparing a rival piece of software of its own, while the deep blue sea, in the shape of the open-source community, has come up with a pure community-based version called Xen.

The logical response to such threats: borrow from the open-source toolkit. By letting other tech companies look at its source code and have some influence over how its software is developed, VMWare might be able to cement wider support for the technology and prevent new rivals from gaining a hold.

The open-source purists are not impressed at this half-hearted approach to "openness". On Slashdot.org, the internet forum for hardcore developers, there have been rumblings of criticism. Is it true open-source? No. But it is a sign that powerful ideas that have bubbled to the surface in one of the world's most dynamic industries have filtered through into the wider corporate consciousness. That is something to cheer.

The writer is the FT's technology correspondent in San Francisco