It’s been interesting to see how many people have picked up on the concept of open source 4.0 especially since it was ignored when I first made reference to it over eighteen months ago.

A little bit of flattery goes a long way, and referring to it this time as potentially the golden age of open source probably didn’t hurt, but I also think it is now evident that the focus has shifted from vendor-dominated open source development and distribution projects to corporate-dominated development communities.

Not all the feedback has been entirely positive, of course. Alan Shimel voices his scepticism with a comparison to the dawning of the Age of Aquarius and 5th Dimension.

Personally I would consider Wyld Stallyns as a better musical comparison since, like open source 4.0, Wyld Stallyns music promises to help put an end to war and poverty… align the planets and bring them into universal harmony, allowing meaningful contact with all forms of life: from extra terrestrials to common household pets. And, it’s excellent for dancing.

But I digress… Alan's scepticism about the concept of open source 4.0 is based on the view that "as soon as any of these large consumers of open source that are dominating a community sense an advantage to be had over their competitors, they will seize it and run with it."

This is a very "open source 3.0" view of the world – which is to say that it relies on an assumption that in order to gain commercially from an open source project a vendor needs to control it. The point of open source 4.0 is that collaborating on development projects and seizing commercial advantage are not mutually exclusive concepts.

By commercializing open source projects indirectly, through complementary products and services, multiple vendors are able to seize a commercial advantage and run with it without endangering the core open source project. As long as they continue to collaborate on the non-differentiating code, the project should benefit from being stretched in multiple directions.

There will inevitably be some vendors that want to have their cake and it eat – benefiting from the work of others without sharing – but that is an inherent risk with community-developed open source, and I would argue that most have learned that they stand to gain more from collaborating than they do from forking and that it is in their own commercial interests to contribute to the common good.

Witness the current ecosystem of vendors growing around Hadoop. IBM, Cloudera, Karmasphere, Datameer, GOTO Metrics, Pentaho and many others are working on (often) proprietary extensions to the Apache Hadoop projects to respond to commercial opportunities – and yet they all continue to contribute non-differentiating code back to the core project.

They do so not for altruistic reasons, and not because they are compelled to do so, but because it benefits them commercially. This is not an ideal, and it is not not a theory. It is the modern Apache community. It is Eclipse community. It is OpenStack. It is open source 4.0.

In other words – be excellent to each other. And party on, dudes.

We explain more about our theory of the evolution of commercial open source in Control and Community, the follow-up to our Open Source is Not a Business Model report, which is now available. The report provides more context for the economic motivators and issues involved in the various models, as well as updated research on which vendors are following which strategies, and why, as well as a survey of 286 open source software users to uncover what they make of it all. The report will be freely available to CAOS subscribers. For more details of the CAOS research practice, and to apply for trial access, click here.