xtian

In June of 1999, Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker released a piece of software called Napster. Napster allowed those who had purchased a commercial CD and ripped it to the MP3 format to distribute their MP3s directly and efficiently to a worldwide audience via a P2P network, thereby depriving artists, rightsholders and distributors of potential revenue from additional sales.

Unsurprisingly, the record companies and their trade organization, the RIAA, were appalled at their products being shared user-to-user for free rather than purchased directly. In their eyes, their formerly paying customers were all thieves, not would be buyers who merely wanted a simpler, more convenient way to purchase music digitally. As a result, their response to this disruptive threat was not to offer users what they wanted: an online purchasing offering. Instead, they attempted to further restrict the digitization of physical media such as CDs, they employed advertising scare tactics and eventually litigation of their would be customers. They saw licensing and enforcement as the solution to a business model problem, in other words.

Commercial open source organizations who are considering licensing as a solution to their business problem, then, might want to focus not on whether Amazon is taking advantage of open source software, but why customers are flocking to Amazon and other cloud providers. Whether or not one believes that cloud providers can and should do more to support the open source projects – and the view here is that it is inarguably the case – is immaterial. Ultimately the problem faced by commercial open source organization is less the fact that the open source licenses they rely on are too liberal than the fact that customers want what many commercial open source organizations are unable or unwilling to provide: a managed service. Licensing cannot address that problem.