WinAmp and the Problem Of Open Source Business Model
Winamp is just the latest face on an uncomfortable fact - Open Source is a risky, ney terrible, business model.
Before we get back to Winamp, let’s consider another recent blow up over open source and business…Wordpress vs WP Engine. The company behind the Wordpress opens source product, Automattic, is suing WP Engine and vice versa. The details are unimportant for this discussion but it’s the classic “we give away our source code and make our money with the hosted version”. Every business who makes their money on a product they develop via an open source model, has to keep SOME exclusivity somewhere in order to make money. After all, they are giving away the source code. They don’t want to give away their ability to make money. We all can download wordpress for free and host our own sites. It’s open source. Wordpress.com makes it’s money when you pay THEM to host for you. WP-Engine saw an opportunity to take that same free software, and create a directly competitive offering using that same code.
Even huge companies are at risk when equally huge companies do the same thing. Oracle Unbreakable Linux is just Redhat Enterprise Linux. Oracle had so much of their business on top of Redhat, had developed their own support organization to support their customers using Redhat to run Oracle on - that they decided to just cut Redhat out. They fork it, do nothing but change it’s name and then make money selling service for their version of Redhat Linux.
Amazon did the same thing with MySql. There are devils in the details, but the common point is that this is a major weakness in open source as a business model. Somebody somewhere has enough money and time to take WHATEVER part you held back to make money, and replace “you making money” with “them making money”.
Back to Winamp. One might think that their “no fork” policy was some naive “we don’t know how open source works” blunder. I don’t think so. They knew exactly what they were facing by open sourcing Winamp. They didn’t want Apple, Microsoft or Spotify to just take their code, give nothing back, and use their brand and financial clout to put out SpotAmp or some such. And for sure, something like that would have happened.
These are not the ‘community developed’ software like how Linux started. These are software wholly paid for and developed by the company behind them. They offer the source code more as a marketing tactic, loss leader to their “for profit” efforts. Who can blame them?
I will say that WinAmp’s take is more like “we want free software developers” by putting out an open source product with a “no fork” license. They aren’t going to care about LeeAmp or LundukeAmp and all the GithubForkAmps that are going to come out. They wanted to ensure no well funded AppleAmp stole away their business. Which begs the question of what they were looking for in open sourcing. Which, I submit, is “please improve our product for free”.
But, as bad as that may sound - the real problems isn’t Winamp - it’s open source as a business model. There is no fix for the fundamental flaw that it’s impossible to put a moat around your income if the source code is free.