Open Source Means Freedom to Make Profits
Although not many were ready to bet on the business sustainability of Open Source, the adoption of open source software in private firms, particularly in Europe, has grown exponentially. Of course, its commercial success is due to the gratuity of the product, but a recent poll conducted by Survey Interactive on a sample of around one thousand firms has set the use of open source software at 51% in Germany, 43% in Great Britain, and 42% in France.
Usually open source software is seen as the antithesis of proprietary software. But also open source is proprietary, in the sense of being protected by intellectual property rights. The distinction between the open and proprietary has rather to do with how the source is created and shared, and how copyright is managed and software distributed. While proprietary software makes the source code inaccessible, open source software gives total access; while the copyright holder is the owner of software house, open source software is multi-authored and communal; while distribution of proprietary software follows the traditional "all rights reserved" model, open source adopts the much more flexible General Public License (GPL), according to which those receiving the license for free shall maintain its gratuity after changes and updates are made.
Internet is clearly the medium that has enabled the aggregation of independent programmers around the various projects, thereby making open source software a cumulative invention. It's the willingness to share the results of software development across the community of coders that gives rise to open source products that are distributed by individuals and firms across the Net. But this is not all, there are companies like Red Hat, Caldera and Suse, who make revenues and profits from the distribution of the Linux operating system, which, being regulated by GPL, is distributed for free along with its source code. The business model here is built not around the product, but in the accessory services to the product, such as business client support and the real-time supply of the most recent software upgrades.
All this makes open source a demonstration of the tendency of IT markets to go beyond existing frameworks, creating not only new products, but also innovating the very modalities by which we create and distribute them.