Black Duck Blog

Peter Vescuso
Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development
pvescuso@blackducksoftware.com
Free software vs. open source software? It’s a frequent ideological debate in the media. Matt Asay, a CNET reporter and VP of Business Development at open source company Alfresco, had a good blog on this recently called “Free software is dead. Long live open source” at:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10361785-16.html?tag=mncol;title

Comparing free software to open source software is difficult and, fortunately for most developers, irrelevant. One is more of a social movement (free software) and the other is more of a development approach (open source software). The reason it’s mostly irrelevant to developers is pragmatism: developers are busting their butts to create some cool new innovation and what they care about is finding good code they can use.

We’ve been talking about pragmatism and open source software for some time now at Black Duck. Pragmatism sounds like a dry topic, but for software developers it represents a smarter way of getting work done. Finding good code to use — whether it’s described as free and/or open source, where it meets business requirements — speeds development in today’s multi-source development model, reduces costs, and frees developers to be more creative. It’s not an ideological discussion – it’s a pragmatic decision to use the best code available, regardless of source, as long as it meets requirements for functionality, security and quality.

The trick, of course, is managing free and open source software in today’s multi-source development process. Licensing, quality, security, and code provenance are areas of uncertainty that must be managed when using any software component. Process and policy are necessary, but not sufficient, to deal with these challenges; technology is needed to support decision making, process automation and governance of components over an application’s lifecycle.

Choosing “free software” vs “open software” is not a question a developer will often wrestle with, but rather “does this code meet my requirements” and “can I/my company comply with the stated license obligations?” For companies using free and open source code in their development streams, ideology is a distraction, pragmatism is a best practice, and management is a necessity.