While recently researching a review of Steinlager Pure I came across a disturbing practice by one of the biggest alcohol companies in Australia and New Zealand, if not the world. It is certainly one of the coolest television ads on New Zealand television, but Lion Nathan has managed to severely limit it’s reach by not allowing it to be displayed on YouTube. The advertisement I’m talking about is the Steinlager Pure ad where Harvey Keitel talks about how cool New Zealand is and how much he loves Steinlager Pure. Yet through a big company mentality it has been pulled down from YouTube and thus pulled down from a range of websites who would have embedded the ad on their websites. I have contacted Lion Nathan about this asking for their comment, but have not received a reply yet.

Companies nowadays spend vast amounts of time and money trying to get videos to go “viral”, the idea is to get enough people to watch the video that it starts hitting the “most viewed” lists. This becomes self-perpetuating with the high traffic of the featured lists causing more and more people to see it, if the video has become truly viral before long every man and his dog has seen the video. This is the sort of exposure that companies would love, but obviously not Lion Nathan with there Steinlager Pure. I would definitely reccomend they read the ClueTrain manifesto, but maybe they are too cool, that’s certainly what the advertising would have you think.

We here at Xebidy spend a lot of time working in and around “open source”, but we often receive questions as to what, why and how. That is, what is “open source”, why does it exist, and who is responsible for it?

What is Open Source?

When people speak about “open source” most often it is in relation to “Open Source Software.” This is a type of software developed and released under certain licenses. This means that when you receive Open Source Software (OSS) you have a license to distribute and modify it, generally this is however you see fit as long as this is done with the same license to whomever receives it. This normally means that you pass your changes back to the main project who incorporates them and the piece of software improves with changes not from one company, but an entire community. There are heaps of software projects developed in this way a few of which are, our favourite Firefox, Apache, Linux, Wordpress and Silverstripe.

We generally take a slightly different outlook on what we mean when we speak about “open source.” We consider it to not only apply to software, but more the communities that developed first around the software projects but now are popping up around other things, normally websites. Let me deconstruct that with some examples, Wikipedia – open source encyclopedia, WikiTravel – open source travel guide, Metafilter – open source question and answer. You get the idea.

One of the most important traits of “open source” is the low barrier to entry. Anyone can contribute and benefit from the work of the community at little or no cost.

Who and Why Open Source?

There are a variety of reasons people develop and contribute to “open source” projects. To some extent it is like asking people why they pick up litter they see blowing on the street, for individuals it might be the sense of belonging to the community or the sense of achieving something for the greater good. An expert in open heart surgery may drop in to the wikipedia article (which I’ve heard on good authority is very accurate and informative) and correct any problems with it and perhaps add a photo to the article for no other reason than letting other people be as equally informed as themselves.

On a corporate/company level the reasons are more clear - the benefits they gain from open source outweigh the cost of being involved. In our case here, we use a variety of OSS, Silverstripe, Wordpress, MediaWiki and other smaller projects such as Prototype Javascript Library and Control.Modal.

There are a variety of ownership styles involved with these projects - some companies bootstrap their business on the software they contribute to, while other projects have no clear ownership ties. A perfect example of this is Wordpress. Automattic is the biggest contributor to the Wordpress blogging software, but also own and operate the Wordpress.com blogging host. As far as I’m aware most of the code used when you type into a wordpress.com blog is available to download from wordpress.org. They make money by providing services to this software rather than selling it. Services such as Akismet (for businesses), custom CSS and custom domain names.