Proprietary Software’s Competition from Open Source Software
Proprietary software, or closed source software, is facing competition from open source software in numerous markets. The Open Source Initiative dictates ten criteria that open source software must meet, one of which being that the source code must be included with the program. Licenses that adhere to the Open Source Initiative’s Open Source Definition allow for free distribution and modification of open source software. One prominent open source license is the GNU General Public License (GPL.) The GNU GPL outlines the central philosophies of free software.
Some reasons that people or companies choose open source software over proprietary software include security, overall cost, and the ability for anyone to improve on the software. With source code freely available, any person can find and report or possibly even fix security vulnerabilities, whereas developers of proprietary software must address any security vulnerabilities. The total cost of ownership in regard to the use of open source software is much lower than that of proprietary software as most of the software is free and if it is free, then it will remain that way. Anyone can modify open source software to fit their own requirements, although it is considered proper to submit modifications upstream to the altered codebase in order to prevent complications during software upgrades.
There are, however, disadvantages to using open source software. These disadvantages include potential cease of support for software, security risks due to source code transparency, and additional training for employees. If a company developing open source software does not make enough money on providing support for its software, then it can stop maintaining that software. Open source software is vulnerable to security threats by malicious hackers because the ways in which the software functions are exposed. Also, the cost to train employees to learn to maintain and work with open source software can be expensive for companies as most employees are taught to use proprietary software.
Windows is currently facing competition from Linux in a desktop environment. Microsoft attempted to converge the user experiences of touch screen devices and desktop personal computers with Windows 8 in October 2012, however, due to negative reactions regarding the user interface of Windows 8, Microsoft released Windows 8.1 in October 2013 to create a more satisfying experience for mouse and keyboard users of desktop personal computers. According to NetMarketShare, Windows 8 currently has a 6.66 percent market share on desktops and Windows 8.1 currently holds a 2.64% desktop market share.
Canonical, the company behind the popular Linux distribution Ubuntu, has been making similar attempts at convergence with their user interface named Unity. Canonical has made recent ventures in the smartphone market using Unity with Ubuntu Touch. Nonetheless, Unity has garnered a significant amount of criticism from desktop users. Clement Lefebvre, the project leader of Linux Mint, a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu, continues to put emphasis on the initial targeted platform of Linux Mint, the desktop PC, and does not believe that radical changes should be made to the user interface of a desktop operating system.
Much of Microsoft’s dominance in the desktop market is attributed to the fact that Windows is preinstalled on most computers. Despite this, hardware manufacturer Asus and Canonical have created a partnership to sell laptops with Ubuntu preinstalled in order to gain more of a hold in the education market. It is important for companies such as Microsoft and Canonical to please customers in their efforts to converge touch screen and mouse and keyboard desktop experiences as the personal computer market is in decline in most areas of the world. Recent reports from Gartner, Inc. have shown that the Western European desktop personal computer market declined by 12.8 percent in the third quarter of 2013 while the Indian desktop personal computer market grew by 7.9 percent during the same quarter.
Nonetheless, one area where the desktop remains prevalent is the personal computer gaming market. Windows has remained the leading operating system for these games, although Valve, the company that created the digital distribution platform Steam, has been pushing to increase Steam’s presence on Linux after Gabe Newell, the managing director at Valve, called Windows 8 a "catastrophe for everyone in the PC space.” At the 2013 LinuxCon North America, Newell stated that Linux was the future of gaming. Soon afterward, Valve unveiled SteamOS, a new Linux distribution designed as a platform for games to be released to the public in 2014.
Another area where open source software is facing competition from proprietary software is the smartphone and tablet operating system market. Google’s mostly open source Android operating system is currently facing competition from Apple’s proprietary iOS operating system. Android is currently dominant in the mobile market, though the threat of another company forking Android and sharing similar success, the most significant current example being Amazon forking Android for use with its Kindle Fire line of tablets, has caused Google to start developing its own apps as proprietary software.
Android cannot be fully open source because a significant amount of the software that interacts with hardware in Android devices is proprietary. Two aftermarket operating systems, CyanogenMod, which is based on Android, and Replicant, which is based on CyanogenMod, aim to provide smartphone and tablet users iterations of Android that are nearly entirely comprised of open source software.
While Microsoft is currently locked out from sharing Google’s and Apple’s success with their smartphone operating system Windows Phone, Microsoft has recently been competing in the entry-level smartphone market with Nokia’s Windows Phone Lumia handsets. Even in the entry-level market, Microsoft is starting to face competition from Android 4.4, named KitKat, which is designed to perform well on devices with just 512 megabytes of RAM. Mozilla’s fully open source Firefox OS, which Mozilla describes as “Built entirely using HTML5 and other open Web standards,” is also competing with Microsoft and Google in the entry-level smartphone market. Like CyanogenMod and Replicant, Mozilla aims to give smartphone owners freedom with the software provided to them.
Open source software is also facing competition from proprietary software in the web browser market. The three web browsers with the greatest market share according to NetMarketShare are Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Google’s Chrome, and Mozilla’s Firefox. Of the three, Firefox is the only browser that is fully open source. Chrome, which derives its source code from the open source Chromium project, created fierce competition in what was once a fairly dormant market. After the release of Firefox 4 in 2011, Mozilla moved to a rapid release schedule for Firefox in which Mozilla started releasing a new version of Firefox every six weeks while Microsoft has included support for WebGL and SPDY, two open standards, in Internet Explorer 11, which is included with Windows 8.1.
Earlier in 2013, Google forked the open source WebKit rendering engine, which it had been using with Chrome and Chromium, and created Blink, thus giving Google more freedom with Chrome. Opera Software recently deprecated their closed source rendering engine, Presto, and announced that their web browser, Opera, which had a marginal market share, would move to WebKit, though after Google’s initial announcement of Blink, Opera Software announced that Opera would use Blink.
Another example of proprietary software facing competition from open source software is Microsoft’s different Office suites and Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity software confronting competition from open source office suites and open source cloud-based productivity software. Team members of Oracle’s OpenOffice.org, which was once the most popular open source office suite, created The Document Foundation and forked OpenOffice.org after Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, creating LibreOffice. In 2011, Oracle stopped development of OpenOffice.org and handed the project to the Apache Software Foundation, which renamed OpenOffice.org “Apache OpenOffice.” Although a number of open source office suites, including LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice, that range in popularity exist, Google has recently showed stronger competition than fully open source alternatives to Microsoft’s productivity software, including Office 365, a subscription-based office suite, and Microsoft Exchange, a cloud-based email hosting software product for businesses, with Google Apps, a cloud-based service offering productivity software to businesses, however, most of the software that Google Apps provides is proprietary. Although a recent Forrester report shows that Microsoft’s cloud-based offerings are dominant, in 2013, the city of Boston switched from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps.
Finally, workplace trends can change the form of competition between open source and proprietary software. Mozilla has ceased development of new features on Thunderbird, which once competed against Microsoft Outlook as an email client, due to businesses shifting from using email clients to using webmail services. Mozilla now only provides stability and security updates for Thunderbird. Proprietary software faces competition from open source software in many markets, including desktop environments, smartphone and tablet operating systems, web browsers, and office productivity software and services. Proprietary software may still show clear dominance in some of these markets, but open source software faces a clear threat to that dominance in each of these markets.
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