Opinion: The open source

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February 24, 2000
Web posted at: 8:36 a.m. EST (1336 GMT)

by Nicholas Petreley

(IDG) -- If you talk to venture capitalists, you might get the impression that free software is a dead end for capitalism. I recently spoke with some very successful venture capitalists who told me the criteria they use for making investments. The word "proprietary" kept coming up again and again. They look for well-managed companies with a great, timely, proprietary product to sell.

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There's more to venture capital than that. To be fair, some people I talked to said they would invest in an open-source company if it had an exceptional management team and good branding and market visibility.

But their point is still well taken. It isn't enough to have a great idea to succeed in a capitalist market. You have to have a way to leverage that idea into a money maker. Most of the time that means having a proprietary design.

This is the problem that besets hardware device manufacturers that want to participate in the open-source revolution. Take the vendors of sound cards, display cards, and the like. Believe it or not, most of these companies want to be able to release their device drivers as open source. Better still, they would like to release the hardware specifications for their device and let the open-source community build the device driver from the ground up.

But they are afraid to open up all of their driver source code because that exposes proprietary secrets about their hardware. That gives their competitors the ability to copy their unique designs without having to reverse engineer the proprietary hardware. I invited a panel of experts to talk about this issue at LinuxWorld Expo in New York. The panel included representatives from Adaptec, Ariel, Aureal, Creative Labs, and Matrox. Each of these companies has approached the issue of open-source drivers differently, but they were all able to agree upon one thing. They have no problem opening the specifications of their hardware or opening the source code for everything from the PCI bus backward. But they don't want to reveal source code for programs that drive the proprietary chip sets on the board.

This is actually an ideal solution because it protects customer and vendor. The customer gets enough source code to understand how to initialize the card, communicate with it, and control it. This makes customers feel secure because the source gives them enough power to fix most potential card problems. The vendor is protected because its algorithms for the proprietary hardware on the board remain secret.

Vendors should take note of this, because it makes it possible for them to ride the open-source wave without sacrificing the one thing that makes their product uniquely valuable.

If you were going to design or support an open-source device driver, would you require the source code for the proprietary hardware on a card? Or would you be content with having the code deal only with the card from the PCI bus on back?

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