Technology barriers are responsible for the slow growth of the IT industry, and the open source movement is necessary to overcome them. Open source has the potential to create new markets and revitalize the IT industry.
The growth of IT products has slowed down in the last five years, with the exception of wearables, as no new categories have been introduced. The same is true for IT services. A prime example is mobile applications. In 2008, smartphones opened up a new category of software services called mobile applications (apps), but today’s mobile app market is full of duplicates, and it’s hard to find popular apps like Twitter and Facebook anymore. So why aren’t we seeing more new services or new product suites?
There are technology barriers. New services could be created with the technology that exists today, but most of the technology on the market is not publicly available and therefore unavailable. This is only possible by paying huge royalties or developing the technology from scratch, but the upfront costs are significant, making it impossible for startups and individual developers to jump in with an idea. To overcome these technology barriers and reignite the explosive growth of the IT industry, I believe the open source movement needs to be revitalized. Before I explain why, let’s define the open source movement.
Open source movements vary in the extent to which they disclose information. My definition of the open source movement is as follows “1. Hardware: release schematics and reference materials. 2. software: fully disclose application programming interfaces (APIs),” where reference material refers to a principled description of how the features provided by the hardware are implemented and how to use them, and APIs are interfaces that control the functionality provided by an operating system or programming language for use in application programming. This is different from source code, for example, a map API allows you to create a program that can search for places, get directions, etc. without knowing the source code that creates the map.
My reasons for supporting the open source movement are simple. Open source has the power to create new markets on a global scale. In fact, it’s already created one big IT market. It’s the software industry market today. C, the first programming language that created the software industry market, is licensed under the GPL license, which is a copyleft (as opposed to copyright) license that originated with the idea of “let’s share software freely”. With the explosion of personal computers (PCs), the software market exploded, in large part due to C being freely available. Later derivative languages such as C++ and JAVA were also licensed as open source, and most software today is written in these languages, and the software market was worth $65.6 billion in 2012. In other words, programming languages were the most fundamental part of programming, but by opening them up, the IT industry exploded. Opening up software APIs allows for the efficient utilization of existing technologies, and as you can see from the examples above, opening up APIs can open up new categories of the IT industry.
Let’s look at a different example. There is an embedded board called Arduino. It is a hardware board based on the idea of easy, fast production and free use, and it is currently used for educational purposes, and its schematics and reference materials are actively published. Thanks to the well-published reference material, the forums are active, and developing ideas with Arduino is almost zero-cost. That’s why people who are exposed to Arduino actually make their ideas come to life, with no expectation of profit. You only have to look at Instructables and Kickstarter to see the explosion of new tech ideas using Arduino. The open source nature of the hardware gives people the opportunity to try out different ideas.
It’s a fascinating process. The Arduino is the software base of this explosion, which is C++ with a GPL license. In other words, the open source license of C++ fused with the open source of hardware to create an explosion of ideas. We can see here that open source creates new open source, and as this process repeats, it can lead to the realization of more diverse ideas without the need for people to think about commercial purposes or profit structures.
From the above, open source may seem like the most desirable behavior in the IT industry marketplace. However, in reality, proprietary licensed software dominates the software market. Why? If the open source movement is the most desirable, why doesn’t it seem to be very active right now? Some might answer this question with the example of revenue. Of course, it’s the biggest reason. Proprietary licensed software guarantees a certain income, whereas open source is less certain than proprietary. That’s why companies that need to make a profit are hesitant to take the plunge. However, open source has an advantage over proprietary software that overcomes its financial disadvantages and that proprietary software can never achieve. It can drive their existing revenue structure. And that means more than just making more money. It means being able to lock developers, users, and businesses into their services. If they can get a lot of companies, developers, and users locked into their service, it makes it much easier for them to build other services in the future.
Google is a prime example of this. Google is an advertising company. Interestingly, Google’s only source of income is advertising revenue. However, the company has taken advantage of the benefits of open source, most notably Android and Google Analytics. Android has released its APIs and published them as open source software, which means that manufacturers don’t pay royalties to use it. This has resulted in a large number of users, with 84.6% of the world’s smartphone users using Android. Google receives a huge amount of information about users from Android and uses it to personalize ads. The same is true for Google Analytics. Google Analytics provides smartphone application (or app) developers with an analytics API that allows them to understand how their apps are being used around the world. Information such as the time of day, location, and type of usage is sent to Google’s servers, which in turn provides developers with graphs and analytics. Google receives this information and uses it to serve personalized ads and to analyze trends in future service development.
In addition, there is a way to monetize open source itself: providing consulting and solutions for open source projects that it has developed. Even if the technology is open source, it is the developer or developer company that understands the technology best, so if there is a problem with the open source, they can provide advice and solutions and earn revenue from the service. As you can see, open source itself has a way of ensuring the survival of companies, and it also has the advantage of solving the problem of piracy that proprietary license structures can cause.
Due to the above advantages of open source, the open source movement is already gaining momentum in the software field. Portal sites such as Naver and others already provide open APIs for maps, encyclopedias, and blogs, and Twitter has released not only APIs but also the source code for its source code error checker and real-time traffic processing technology. More and more developers are taking advantage of this, and it will soon have an impact on hardware. As the open source movement grows in the future, the market for software and hardware will become a place for new ideas to be realized, and the current stagnant IT market will be revitalized.
