Fostering open source services

Open source is really good at creating products. Almost any commercial software package or product like Word, Excel, Windows, or Photoshop has a great open source equivalent. However, open source has been less successful at creating services. Where’s the open source version of Google, or Facebook, or Twitter, or Gmail, or Craigslist?

You could sum it up with this drawing:

Now to be fair, the bottom-right box isn’t completely empty. There’s Wikipedia, which is a phenomenal service/website supported by donations. There’s Tor, where many companies and people volunteer to run relays and bridges. There’s BOINC, which is the open source software used by volunteers for SETI@home and Folding@home. There’s also OpenStreetMap, which is a wonderful resource.

But why aren’t there more open source services? Let’s run down some differences between products and services.

“One and done” vs. ongoing support

With open source products, it can take a lot of work to create something great like Linux or Firefox, but then everyone can download that product and use it immediately–there’s no extra cost for the producer or the consumer, other than maybe a bit of bandwidth for downloading.

Once a product is done, it’s often done–frozen until the next major update. A product might take a year or more to reach a milestone, but it can often be used for years after that. In contrast, services may change from week to week, which implies strong product leadership to determine priorities.

Abuse

If you download a copy of LibreOffice, you might write some unpleasant things or even hate speech, but that doesn’t hurt LibreOffice itself. However, if someone sets up a “free as in beer” translation API or geocoding API, you often see multiple levels of abuse. For example, some people might use a service so much that it overloads the service provider. Or people might scrape the translation API in an attempt to generate spammy text in lots of different languages. When you offer a product, potential abuse is usually less of an issue.

User Experience and Speed

Products don’t have to be perfect; often “free as in beer” is enough of a feature that someone will use GIMP as opposed to paying for Photoshop. But user experience and speed do matter, and commercial services have a strong incentive to nail both of those issues. It takes a ton of work to be fast, for example. Commercial services are often “free as in beer” as well as fast and pleasant to use.

Funding models

Thanks for staying with me so far, because I think this is the most important difference. I believe what might be missing is a good funding model for open source services. With a finished product, if you can find someone to donate bandwidth for downloading and maybe a simple website, you’re close to done. But with a service, there’s typically an ongoing cost involved with every API call. For something like web search, there can be a lot of processing work going on behind the scenes.

So what are the major funding models that might support an open source service? Right now, I can think of ads, occasional pledge drives, grants, subscriptions, or micropayments. From that list, my guess is that ads are the least appropriate. If ads are easily separated or can be blocked, then you might get a “free rider” problem where someone could take your service, remove all the ads, and offer it up as their free service. Personally I think advertising can be incredibly useful and responsive to a user’s needs, but some other individuals dislike ads. Ads can be the foundation of a freemium or hybrid approach; for example, I think Automattic offers free blogging on WordPress.com and funds itself partly through ads.

Regarding pledge drives, Wikipedia is a notable success, but it’s a lot of work on both the producer side and the user side, much like public radio (by the way, you can donate to Wikipedia here). Grants can work well, but grants tend to end after a few years, so they aren’t a complete solution to sustainability.

That leads me toward subscriptions or micropayments. I’m excited to see some movement in this area. Patreon lets you support your favorite creators and does at least a couple smart things. First, they only take 5% of donations. That puts them in the “doing it for the love” category. Patreon can be beloved while still making some money ($1M in donations each month * 5% cut * 12 months means >$600K/year). Second, they attempt to minimize payment fees by charging only once a month for all the people you support. So if you’re supporting four creators, then the credit card charges are split four ways. The first move is brilliant, and the second is very smart.

Bitcoin is another possibility for micropayments, although it’s still early days for that. I’m also excited to see Google Contributor launch. The idea is that a user contributes a certain donation each month. As the user surfs around a participating site, they don’t see ads on that site, but the site still gets paid from the user’s contribution.

Ultimately, I don’t know how to foster more open source services. I just know that I want them. In the same way that Firefox pushed Internet Explorer to improve or Apache pushed IIS, I personally would like having an open source search engine to push Google as well. Wikia Search was an attempt at that, but it didn’t get much traction.

Maybe the answer isn’t funding. In a recent talk, Melody Kramer floated the idea that people could support public radio in *tons* of different ways like volunteering their time or experience, not just with money. Maybe we need better ways for companies or regular people to volunteer their CPU, storage, or bandwidth. If we all kicked in 10% of our free disk space, could we come up with open source versions of Dropbox, Box, or Google Drive?

So I don’t have the answer. I just think it’s an interesting and perhaps an important problem. Do you agree? How would you foster more open source services?

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