Open Source vs. Proprietary Software vs. Good Software

I had the opportunity to spend a few hours at Oscon yesterday in Portland, Oregon. Oscon is the Open Source Conference held by O’Reilly. I was pleasantly surprised by the size of the conference, the number of exhibitors and the presence of several large companies. Open source software has definitely become mainstream and accepted by industry.

At Likewise, we consider ourselves an open source company. Likewise Open has been very successful and has opened many doors for us (no pun intended). It’s helped us tremendously, even when we end up selling our Enterprise version instead. Nevertheless, I have some observations about open source, not all of them positive.

There are several definite advantages to using open source. It enables you to build a solution without having to reengineer every component. We make use of both MIT Kerberos and OpenLDAP in our products. If we had needed to rewrite these components, it would have taken us much longer to get to market. We’ve also made use of Samba components. Samba has been around a long time, has had “a lot of eyes” on it and has figured out the subleties of talking to Microsoft systems. Again, using open source saved us a lot of time.

There are some disadvantages to open source, too. It can be difficult to get the “owners” of an open source project to do what you think is the right thing. Although open source is “open”, certain projects are led by designated groups of people. Different projects have different guidelines around software submission and how they go about accepting external contributions. Very often, your contributions have to be vetted before they’re accepted in the main code. If your code is not accepted, your only option is to distribute your own modified version of the open source project (your branch). Branching is not a good thing.

Sometimes, code changes are rejected due to style considerations or differences in design approaches. These are objections that can be dealt with relatively easily. More difficult are rejections due to “dogma”. Some open source projects, for example, are irrationally opposed to anything that they perceive as helping Microsoft. Even our intent is to make non-Windows systems work better they still oppose our goal of making these systems work better with Microsoft Active Directory. This, of course, doesn’t apply to the Samba project (who had the goal before we did) but applies to other open source projects/companies/teams with which we’ve had to deal.

There is little we can do in these cases other than to develop our own alternatives.

Another issue which we’ve encountered with some open source software is a certain lack of industrial rigor. I’ve worked a lot with both commercial software developers (I spent 11 years at Microsoft) and with academic programmers (4 years at Microsoft Research). Sometimes, open source software sometimes resembles the latter more than the former.

What do I mean by “academic” programmers? Say that you’re in school, you take a programming course and you’re asked to write a program that converts degrees from Celsius to Fahrenheit. You write something like: 

void main(int c, char **argv)
{
    int degrees = atoi(argv[1]);
    printf("%d Celsius is %g Farhenheit\n", degrees, (degrees * 9.0)/5.0 + 32);
}

Your professor would probably give you a passing grade for this. It works. In industry, however, your boss would likely complain about several things:

  • Crappy user interface. How is the customer supposed to know that the input should appear on the command line?
  • Poor error handling. What happens if you don’t supply a command-line argument? What if you specify a non numeric value?
  • Bad spelling
  • Lack of localization support
  • Lack of comments in code

Open source software is not always industrial quality code. We have found many cases of memory corruption and leakage even in mature open source projects. We have also found and fixed many, many, bugs.

Note that the title of this post does not suggest that proprietary software is immune from similar flaws. Many proprietary software companies (including my ex-employers) are guilty of releasing software that is not ready for prime time. “Good Software” can be either open source or proprietary. Similary, “Bad Software” does not care about its licensing model.

What I will suggest, however, is that companies that have to support their products, keep customers happy and, ultimately, make money are much more motivated to develop Good Software than organizations which develop software but don’t actually have to deal with the consequences of poor code. There is no stronger motivator to write Good Software than an irate customer.