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Sustainability of Open Source Software

(this blog has been re-posted from Alex Gibson’s personal blog – originally published 8/26/2009)

Everyone wants to be sustainable.  It’s the new “hip” way to be for businesses.  It goes beyond simply “going green” – rather it has implications in the social, civic, and financial realms as well.  The Green Plus organization (supported by the Institute for Sustainable Development) looks at sustainability on three key metrics: People, Planet, and Performance.  In other words, in order to be truly sustainable, an organization needs to look at their actions and policies on more than just an environmental level.

So here’s an idea for you: make an organizational move toward the utilization of Open Source Software (OSS).  Yeah, real original, I know: but do it for the purpose of being sustainable.

From Mozilla:
We are helping make the Internet a place…
where you and your neighbors build the world you want.
that generates not only economic value, but also civic and social value.
that is optimized for multiple languages and locales.
that is trustworthy and has minimal risk for users.

OSS has always been driven, developed, and maintained by communities.  Groups of individuals, almost always outside of a “corporation”, develop and support the software for the benefit of the greater good.  Often, the motivation to develop comes from the disappointment driven by the existing available products in the industry (to get a better idea, read Wired Magazine’s Firefox story.  Regardless of the rationale, the community-driven nature of the projects leads first and foremost to an increase in the solidarity of the aforementioned “society”.  As people work together toward a common goal, especially without specific financial or personal (read: selfish) motivations, the entire community prospers.  This display of altruism is rare among so many individuals within large community, which is something that makes projects such as Firefox and Apache so amazing: individuals working together for a common goal of nothing more than to create something great for everyone.  Should we question the Microsoft model now or later?  But I digress…

More than the community aspect, the development process itself is sustainable.  The more time that a piece of OSS is on the market, open for both usage and improvement, the better it becomes for everyone.  There is not the demand for profitability from a corporation, allowing for the focus to remain solely on the improvement of the software and the development process.  I’m not saying that corporate software companies are evil or wrong in their practices: the point is that the open source model lends itself toward a different type of profitability: that of the users, their clients, and the general public as a whole.  For-profit developers would say the same about their products, but it’s different.  OSS developers don’t need to think, “How am I going to make this profitable?”  Rather, they can think, “How can I make this better.”  Corporations have a responsibility to themselves, their shareholders, and indirectly, their clients, to be concerned with their revenue generation (actually a financially-sustainable practice in itself, but for another discussion).

Beyond the growth of a community, OSS projects are developed on the premise of offering solid, free software to the general public – something that businesses can take advantage of as well.  Riley Life, for example, spent well over $2K in software within the first 6 months in business (from the Adobe Suite to various pieces of Microsoft “software” to antivirus protection to you name it).  That’s a nice chunk of cash: and we use what I would consider to be the bare minimum of software due to our business strategy, market niche, and overall needs.  Imagine an actual software development or IT startup: $2K would be pennies.  Now, replace [at least a piece] of that need with free, open source software solutions.  What better way to improve the bottom line than decrease expenditures at the top.  This idea is exactly what is meant by “economic sustainability” – the idea that a business can increase profitability by decreasing the need for expenditures by exploring secondary (read: cheaper) options.  A 2008 Forrester Research survey found that 87 percent of businesses realized a cost savings from the utilization of OSS.

From an environmental standpoint, OSS is and always has been a more friendly option.  In and of the nature of OSS, there is a smaller footprint from its utilization.  The software is available digitally – no packaging required (granted, non-OSS is moving in this direction, but at a slower pace and with fewer options on this front).  It may not sound like much (and it will make me sound like a tree-hugging hippie) but the packaging from a single copy of a piece of software on CD or DVD multiplied by the hundreds of thousands of copies sold is a ton of plastic, paper, and metal.  You know, “save the whales” or something like that.

The point is, when making an effort to move toward sustainability, there are a thousand and one things that an organization can implement.  As I have stated before, “While “going green” is generally associated with drinking lattes, wearing sandals with socks and smelling of patchouli oil, we like to think of it as making the world a better place for the cutest little girl on Earth.”