You go into a conversation from a lawyer’s perspective, expecting the discussion to be all about “ownership, ownership and ownership”. You might expect app and other software developers to focus on nothing other than ownership.
Many times you’d be wrong. One problem with ownership: Misidentification of value.
As Dan Berger of Social Tables pointed out, many technology companies aren’t strictly “technology” plays at all, and their value isn’t in their code, but rather in their execution or implementation.
I recently spoke with Eric Gunderson of Development Seed, whose open-source mapping technologies illustrate the same principle of technology execution: In the case of Development Seed’s MapBox, the great strength is speed. Big data use means great mapping potential, but also means big processing problems. Big processing problems reward innovative design execution. If speed of mapping capability and management of data is a priority, ownership is less of a concern than execution and capabilities. This is true even with proprietary products rather than services. One might of course say, “Use our system, use our product,” but why should we use it? The answer is that you do something better than everyone else out there using comparable – and perhaps even identical – technologies. You wrap it up and package it – and execute it – better and faster.
The coding is valuable, but the greater value is in the execution of the coding and coupling of the organic coding with acquired knowledge from third-party applications and libraries, including (for example) Javascript libraries and other open-source software under GPL, MIT or other licenses.
The code itself may, or may not be open-source, but the value often is in the packaging, in the delivery, in the execution and the support. In reality, I – the end user – cannot do much with the code itself beyond the immediate and narrow need of my specific use, and that will be without support, without updates, modifications, improvements and all the other benefits from open-source collaboration. From the developer’s standpoint, the ability to develop products that continue to feed a renewable support business drives further continued product development.
Whether or not open-source, Social Tables, like MapBox, can benefit from copyright protection as a “collective work” or compilation, and that protection has meaningful value. But as Dan Berger of Social Tables is quick to recognize, the copyright protection has less meaning to his potential market than the elegance of his design and the ease-of-use of his execution. As technologist Piotr Steininger told me recently, referring to SproutCore, with increasing use of open-source, developers – and technology businesses – have realized that “the framework has potential but it can only benefit from open collaboration. So in a sense the company gives up a product but in return gains a better product by sharing it.”
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