A number of conversations I have had recently indicate to me that a lot of the world still doesn’t get what’s behind open source. It’s easy: economics.

The first thing you can trivially explain is why people work on open source at all. This has been a source of a vast amount of speculation, particularly irritatingly by sociologists. Ben Hyde has a fantastic list to which I will only add the explanation I love to hate: geek pride. We do it just to show off to each other.

Nope, it’s all bollocks – the motivation is simple: by solving your common problem together, you reduce your costs. There is absolutely no point in financing five different companies to produce five different products that don’t quite do what you want – far better to tweak the open source thing to do exactly what you need (often expressed as “scratching your itch” around the ASF).

Some people whine that, because this is an option open only to geeks, open source is not really available to completely open participation. Well, kinda. If you aren’t a geek yourself, you can always hire one. What do you mean, you don’t want to spend your money on free stuff? Why not? We all spend our time on it. Time that we could convert into money, if we so chose.

So why don’t we? Because participating in the open source projects we participate in is worth more to us, in purely monetary terms, in the long run. This is why I no longer have much to do with Apache: it does what I need. I have no itch to scratch.

This leads me into the second easily explainable fact. People complain that open source projects don’t care about users. It’s true. They don’t – they care about people who are participating in the costs of producing the software. If you aren’t contributing, why would your voice matter?

Of course, you have to be careful when applying these obvious truths to what you see around you. For example, the presence of companies like Red Hat in the market complicates analysis. They have their own set of economic drivers, including the needs of their customers, which they then apply to the calculation around their participation in various projects. As the reach of open source extends, so do end users actually start to get an indirect say in what happens. But it costs them. Money.

Back in the good old days, it was so much simpler. All it cost me then was time.