by Mark Stone, O'Reilly Open Source Book Editor
The following commentary was written in response to Eric Raymond's article "Microsoft is right".
This has been a fascinating case to watch. People, Eric included, rightly point out that AOL is not playing fair on this count, and playing fair is part of what going Open Source/open standards is all about. Interesting as this is, it misses the larger point (as a side note: Microsoft is hardly playing fair here either; today's news details how Microsoft has built code into their messaging client to disable other messaging clients on the same machine).
AOL should change their tune. But they shouldn't do it out of a sense of fairness. They should do it because it makes good business sense. One of the major business gambits in Open Source is this: hope that having a smaller slice of a larger pie leads to more revenue than having a larger slice of a smaller pie.
This is why, for example, Bob Young proclaims that growing Linux market share is more important than growing Red Hat's dominance within the Linux market. CheapBytes, Walnut Creek, and all the other Red Hat clone vendors are growing Linux market share faster than Red Hat could alone, and if Red Hat takes a smaller percentage of the Linux market it is nonetheless a much bigger market.
The list of companies who have wilted in the face of this risky gambit is long. I suppose Apple comes at the top of that list.And the list of companies who have succeeded using this gambit includes some big players who did it by accident. IBM, for example, never deliberately planned to create a PC-cloning industry. The original PC team was simply trying to figure out how to get the cheapest machine out the fastest. Surprise, surprise: open hardware turned out to be the way to go. And when Compaq exploited the open standard, IBM was furious, much as AOL is today. And indeed, IBM tried to take the standard back with a series of proprietary hardware gambits in the 80s. We all know the outcome of that story: IBM lost the standards battle, and PCs are now referred to as Intel PCs rather than IBM PCs. Except that somehow, IBM is also a big winner here: they have a smaller chunk of a now gargatuan pie.
The most ironic open source success story is surely Microsoft itself. Microsoft became a real company on the strength of one product, Microsoft Basic. And that product became a standard because it was pirated, against the wishes of Bill Gates, and widely distributed. Microsoft owes its key early success to leveraging off of that wide distribution to get the company out of the garage and into the corporate world. This was a brilliant if inadvertent move that even today still galls Bill Gates.
So what's wrong with AOL? It isn't that they are playing unfair. It's that they are playing stupid. They have an enormous opportunity to unify the instant messaging market aroud their standard, thus dramatically growing the size of the pie. Yes, they'll have smaller market share, but they'll also have much greater market size. And they'll have branded themselves as a leader within a cooperative open standard. And we all know the importance of brand management. Just ask Bob Young.
So AOL should get with the program, and welcome Microsoft and Yahoo to the AOL party. It would be good for AOL, and it would be good for the Internet.
The deeper moral here is that many individuals and many companies (O'Reilly itself is guilty of some ambivalence here) talk a good game of Open Source, but secretly believe that this Open Source stuff is all at some level an act of charity, a sacrafice of intellectual property. Too many of us perceive a rift between acting for the greater good, and acting out of enlightened self interest. The beauty, the magic, and the paradox of Open Source is that it constitutes a realm in which the distinction between public good and self interest vanishes.