Open Source is dead long live to Freemium Source
By: Andrés González Aragón
Tags: Freemium, Open Source, Community, Software Development, Software As A Service

Photo by William White on Unsplash

I have been developing software in all levels from more than 20 years now. As coder, team leader, teacher, community contributor, scrum master, consultor, coach, CTO of agencies, startups and international companies. Since then I’ve seen a lot of weird things, met a lot of phony self proclaimed technologist, knew a lot of technologies that were the future and didn’t last less than a few years.

But now something different is happening, something that I didn’t realize as soon as the others, something fuzzy and complex. To be honest, something that I’ve been part of, maybe I could say that is something that I actively participate, more and more every time.

I’m talking about something I like to call Freemium Source, let me explain what this means to me.

Some history from perspective

If you were immerse in software development during the 90’s, then you remember that epic speech when Miguel de Icaza divides Free Software from Open Source one, something that anglo speakers didn’t understand because the they use the same word for something that is free to get, and something that have freedom, in spanish is a little bit different, Gratis and Libre doesn’t mean the same (Miguel and I are from the same city by the way).

I can remember my first effort to explain Open Source to other programmers, freely giving CD copies of Mandrake to anyone, reading a lot of how the laws of my country could fitted the sale of Open Source services.

I remember the face of some clients like 15 years ago when I told them that the code was free of charge after the development, some of them reject that, they said that they paid for it, some of them were happy about not to pay for the code, whatever, they always called me if they wanted a change. I can remember been a little part of an effort called Encicloabierta leaded by danieloso to open all the source that the Mexican government payed to privates to develop educational digital tools (In the Mexican constitution all the Education belongs to the people by right).

So, a lot of things are very different now for Software Developers, thanks (again) to Linus Torvalds for the creation of Git. How would think in that days that a simple Control Version System will have the huge impact Git have had?

At that time the majority of the professional programmers disagreed with Open Source, they (us) used to live selling programs that just work keeping the code for themselves, charging for additional changes or selling to other clients with a few more or less characteristics or even changing logos only. The hole idea of work on open source only sound like madness.

All that change with the appearance of Github and other communities based on share the code. I remember the moment When I discover Github as a community, I mean, i know it for been a git repository as a service, but when they become from that and make a community of developers, well, that was blow-minded.

Suddenly all my dreams about a worldwide community of software developers become true. The ability to find, not only open source projects, the code repository itself was amazingly easy. I mean, in the past years, make a linux distro wasn’t as easy as fork a project and made a few changes. That changes everything, and We thought that was for good.

It was? Was the creation of the open source community a good thing? Of course it was but: Was the marketing around that a good idea? I personally think that doesn’t was.

We create naively the problem

The problem begun when we get how to make money, tons of money with open source. I remember that my Open Source projects were all in Source Forge. It was very nice to have an ssh-access to your own home in a linux computer for free just for your project. But that was all, no community, no sharing, no forks. Then some of us begun to realize that education, training and certification were a good source of income for our Open Source project, but wasn’t enough, I mean, nobody were making millions of it.

So What could be a better business case for Open Source projects? Education, Certification, Training wasn’t enough, and the competition, the privativative software vendors and developers fight back giving al that for free to the developers community, so wasn’t imposible to compete with that.

A few years pass though and efforts like Open Source Guide, Open Source Friday, First Timers Only saw the light. But then everybody seems to be part of Open Source, everybody seems to be a contributor, everybody. At the firs time I thought that they were doing the same as me: Getting free Testers and, in some cases, free developers to contribute for the code that holds our company (At that time an e-commerce platform I was building). I use to think: We share some of the parts of the code with them, and then they share their time to test and improve the quality of the software, What was wrong with that anyway?

Freemium

The thing is, the thing that I didn’t realize, the thing where I was naive was something that were happening in the Video-games industry, the Freemium business case.

Personally, I don’t like Freemium games… but I bought it, or I need to say, I download them, play them and pay to win quickly some times. I think that the amount that I’ve spend in that is no very important, my wife disagree of course, my relationship with it is a mix of hate-love feelings. When you know that, in some point they will offer you a deal that you won’t resist anymore because the game is so hard, or boring or both to play without that precious goodies that are just a few dollars to get. So, now I can decide consciously when I buy a Freemium game to spend 50 dollars on it, but trying not to. You know what I mean? Is like betting (when you’re not sick about it): you decide to spend a few dollars doesn’t matter if you lose or win, but you prefer to win and (If you’re not insane) you have strict limits.

As well as Freemium games, some companies/crews are doing the same with Open Source Projects, they get you the core, or the main library, or the free certification and you think is free, I mean, Open, sometimes even you participate on that, code a little, test a little, write an article supporting them, wearing a T-shirt, pasting a sticker in your laptop, paying for a congress giving a conference about in your city, etc.

The problem starts when, after you get that the magic behind the library has some difficult to swallow design faults: Maybe is easier to code using that library, or maybe is more elegant and fancy. Maybe there are more open positions asking for that technology around the world, or better payed but the performance is slow comparing it with using no library at all. Or testing is hard, or the html compiled is not SEO friendly (I don’t know since when the HTML must compile on the first place). And gets worse when you realize that migrate to other technology with a different paradigm is very hard, then you see yourself and your team trapped using 20 dollars add-ons as a service to fix the issues you have with the library or framework. Thinks that you probably didn’t need if you didn’t implemented the library on the first place, in some cases there are tools you need to use in order to deploy using a deploy system already but “easily”.

The medular point here is that a punter is aware about the spending, a Freemium player is aware about the spending, but a programer, or a Startup CTO or even a Corporate CIO are not aware, She or he support a technology that he believes is amazing only because someone build a marketing campaign around waiting the exact moment to offer payed services.

This kind of services aren’t expensive, one by one, but from 20 dollars to 20 dollars, suddenly a simple application prototype is spending thousands in IT infrastructure. I’ve seen it in Startups and corporations were I worked for.

The solution

So now ¿What is the next step? Well is pretty easy: Be aware, be conscious about the crowd of salesmen wearing an evangelist suit that will try to sell you aggressively. Think in all the indirect marketing you’re receiving, think about who bought the pizzas and the beers for the meet up you are in learning about this amazing technologies.

But, the more important thing is study hard, don’t get frustrated so easily with raw code without dependencies or libraries, try to program your self, don’t implement things only because they’re trendy.

You must learn how to identify the good ones, because not all the Open Source projects are that, but any open source project could be the next one. The main difference is that, if you’re allowed to just copy the code an implement it in your project and if this code can coexist with other frameworks or libraries that do the same.

Don’t fall in this tricks please. Don’t implement libraries, frameworks or open source tools that promises magic, is better to learn how to code magic. Or if you’re willing to use it, know for sure that it will cost some money.