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Karen Copenhaver, a partner at Choate Hall & Stewart LLP, and one of Mass High Tech’s 2008 All-Stars, is an expert on technology licensing, particularly in software licensing and open source. Recently she spoke with Rodney Brown about open source as a business model, where it came from and where it is headed.
Q: How does a business model built on open source work?
A: An open source license means that the person who receives the software has both the rights and the ability to change that software and maintain it themselves forever. It really gives them the software in a form in which they have as much control over the software as the vendor does.
In an open source business model, what the vendor is then paid to do is around providing support, extensions or some sort of services related to that software, and it’s those services that are really of value to the customer. Most people find out that it isn’t really the software that the customer wants — what the customer wants is functionality, and they want the software to work in their environment.
In the open source model, there is perfect competition because if the vendor isn’t providing the services the customer wants, that customer can attain those services from anyone. That means the provider of those services needs to achieve a level of excellence so that the user is very happy being dependent on that provider.
Q: What drives enterprise adoption of open source?
A: Companies have been focused on what their differentiator is — what their customers actually pay them for. There was a lot of infrastructure software that the customers really weren’t interested in. They really didn’t care what operating system the functionality was being provided on. Yet, all of these companies were using their best and brightest resources maintaining their product for these various operating systems. But the customers didn’t value that work at all.
The movement to Linux is really explained by very large companies realizing that if they could have a shared infrastructure on which everyone was co-dependent and therefore was excellently supported by all of them. If this infrastructure was something that customers just assumed would be provided and all of the differentiation was on top of or separated from that infrastructure, those very valuable resources that they were using to build and maintain that rather boring infrastructure layer could be used better in that differentiating level. They learned a lot about how to collaborate in building that shared infrastructure, which is Linux. None of them can or want to control it. They all contribute to it. The people who write Linux sit at HP and IBM and Oracle and Intel and all those big companies— they aren’t people who are sitting at home, these are all people who are supported by big companies and they are all codependent on the building of this infrastructure.
Q: Is the cloud helping drive adoption of open source?
A: The first step toward cloud computing is of course virtualization, and some of the most important virtualization software is open source and some is not. Linux is hugely important to the availability of the cloud because you have this sea of servers, frequently running Linux, which is a very inexpensive system. So the focus is on the functionality that is being made available. I think that cloud computing will be a huge driver of Linux and open source computing because there is an assumption that open source will provide a tremendous reduction in cost.
Q: What is in store for open source?
A: I think that that story is going to be told again and again across many industries. What we have learned on the software side about how to do this co-dependence is that in order for people to be willing to be co-dependent, everything has to be the same. Everyone has to contribute, everyone has to carry their weight and everyone has to have the same rights. An open source license is pretty simple, and everyone has to buy into the same terms. The software industry learned that because we were taken to places of collaborative development by the original leaders of the open source movement. I don’t know that we could have got there on our own. When IBM looked at this Apache web server that was being built by Brian Behlendorf in this collaborative mode, they said, “We have been spending a ton of money on our web server and this is better.” It was a recognition that this crowd-sourcing could be very powerful.
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