The 2008 Nonprofit Technology Conference reinforced my sense that at this point, it's useful to consider choices about Open Source as a continuum rather than a yes/no. 

If you use Firefox as your browser (and why not?) or your web site runs on Linux and Apache (likely), then you use Open Source software. Open Source means that anyone can see and use the programming (the source code) in which the software was written. The rules are more complete and formal, and you can get the idea on Wikipedia.  (If you use Wikipedia, you use Open Source software, etc, etc).

Past NTCs have had a lot of passion over such things as whether nonprofit community values better correspond to the collaborative and community-oriented spirit of Open Source. (I believe so.) Likewise, we see strong commitments that smaller nonprofits especially should get the best possible value for their technology investments. That means favoring commercially licensed software when that makes sense—including taking advantage of highly subsidized pricing for Microsoft software.

Ultimately, from the developer point of view, Open Source is a yes/no choice. From the software consumer point of view, these days it does feel like a continuum. Conversations and product demonstrations at NTC mirrored our advising experience  on software planning and selection this past year.  Some particulars I have been thinking about.

First, if you license Microsoft Office, you don't get the source code. If you use Sun Microsystem's Open Office (which I generally do), you do get the source code. To the average organization, this matters little. Both can read and write documents according to the Microsoft “.doc” standard. And it would not give me any greater sense of independence or power to know that if I had the Microsoft Office source code, I wouldn't have to worry about Microsoft giving up or making licensing more onerous. With both, for the average nonprofit community user, the software product is take it or leave it and not something to tinker with. So it matters in principle, but not in practice.

Second, many businesses offer hybrid models. Salesforce.com contact and business management system is a closed, proprietary software product. If you license Salesforce, you don't get a copy of the source code. On the other hand, Salesforce has wonderfully opened up the ways you get information in and out of it, and the way it looks and works. All that is free and well documented. What's more, it has fostered a wonderful community of sharing code for doing these things. For the typical developer or nonprofit, the parts of Salesforce that matter are “open enough” for the purpose of making adaptation or customization.

At the NTC, it was refreshing to see the high energy around Salesforce, as well as Google, and now Convio. Idealware.org did a study last winter, which we participated in, on how to evaluate the usability and openness of software vendor's programming tools for data exchange and customization.

Of course, Microsoft, though proprietary software incarnate  for many, has perhaps the best documented and most widely used systems for exchanging and integrating data.  That degree of documented accessibility has fueled the adoption and extension of Microsoft's .Net framework for the web today.

A third consideration for me is that for many organizations today, especially small and medium sized ones, when you plan your support environment, you end up requiring vendor relationships for Open Source  not that different from other vendors. Linux is free and Open Source. Yes, but if you license a Red Hat “Enterprise” edition, you have surrounded that Open Source core with commitments. You restrict your freedom to move much the same as as any other licensing.

At DrupalCon a few weeks ago, we saw the most welcome emergence of Acquia, a new company billed as the future Red Hat of Drupal. The drupal community can use this. But it will also eventually mean similar choices about “commercial grade” drupal and open source unsupported drupal.

And I have also been thinking about and asking peer consultants what they make of Sun purchasing MySQL Open Source database management system. Sun now has opened up Solaris (a Linux like system software), it sponsors Open Office globally, it supports Java, and now MySQL. Yet its roots are the proprietary hardware and software world. Likewise for IBM, which has poured billions into enhancing Open Source's prospects. 

A lot of software is in flux in both directions—more open or edging toward commercialism. At the NTC, we also got to take a look at Mpower, a formerly commercial constituent relationship manager now taking an exciting Open Source turn.

So, as Open Source becomes more mainstream, more folks are trying to come up with viable business models for using and building on it. I guess that's us too. Open Source matters as a vision of how software, and for that matter, intellectual work generally can and should be done. By the same token, from the average organization's point of view, it appears that more and more, you will be operating in a gray area where you enjoy some of the benefits of Open Source systems while some of the restrictions that come from the traditional commercial model.

Much to think about; your comments welcome.