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I've been having an ongoing 'discussion' with a good friend of mine about the nature of open source and what constitutes open source. It makes me want to turn it into a proper noun, Open Source, because his interpretation seems to me to be quite purist. In a kinda 1999, utopianist way which is very specific.

His argument (did I say argument?) is that unless it adheres strictly to the open communal, community development model then it 'aint open source. Mine is that if the source is open and you can do what you want with it, then it's open source.

Open Source

According to the ultimate source of all the knowledge of networked society, Wikipedia,

'open source refers to a computer program in which the source code is available to the general public for use and/or modification from its original design. Open-source code is meant to be a collaborative effort, where programmers improve upon the source code and share the changes within the community. Typically this is not the case, and code is merely released to the public under some license. Others can then download, modify, and publish their version (fork) back to the community. Today you find more forked versions, than teams with large membership.'

And therein lies the problem of open source. It's a nice model, but in practice, someone has to take a lead or it's just an unsupportable mess.

Professional Open Source

This brings us to the concept of professional open source or enterprise open source.

"The more mission-critical the open source software, the more necessary it is to acquire paid support", suggested SUSE's Gerald Pfeifer. "Individual users will often tough out solving problems through community help forums, but SMB owners and enterprise users more likely will opt for paid support rather than devoting internal resources to support open source software,"

This is a business model where an open source software vendor bridges the gap to enterprise grade software which typically is about addressing business requirements and not technical deficiencies.

The business bit is based on generating revenue from paid professional services, maintenance and support provided alongside the software. 

The software itself remains free.

Is it open source?

Yes! That is the point. It's very much within the spirit of the collaboration and openness, and allows open source to challenge the hegemony of the global closed source giants. It is not the open source that has no stewardship of the coding. Not just anybody can put anything into the core but anyone can take the code and do whatever they want with it. It's a product and one which you can modify to your hearts content.

This is open source developing for the real world. Open source for business. Open source for grown-ups.