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But say I'm a board member or an investor in Zoom, whether pre- or post-success: how would you pitch me on the business value of open-sourcing the expensive-to-product client software?Okay. Consider the following fantastical talk from technical me to you, oh dear fantastical board member:
Let's face a fact: yeah open source software is "free (as in free speech)" and it can also be "free (as in free beer)". Anyone can inspect it. Anyone can "steal" it so-to-speak and set up a competitor. That will always be the case. Just look at how many stolen software products end up in your favorite app store. Games are ripped off right down to their copyrightable artwork, malvertisements added, and reuploaded with a new name. But I think worrying about that is like worrying about the people brewing their own beer. I think that's preventing us from building a brewery.
Let's face another fact: what's expensive isn't software. That's pretty cheap. That's just man-hours. A kid in a garage can build video chat over a weekend or two. What's expensive is experience. Experience is basically an impossible-to-estimate number of man-hours. We'll never be able to pay one person or one team to understand all of the pieces and platforms and make it work for everyone.
Customers want to run Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android... and all of that is hard to keep up with. Customers have a plethora of network and hardware configurations. Customers have crazy different bandwidth and latency profiles. It's really hard for us to make our software work in all of that. But some of our customers are experienced and they're curious and they are looking at our software with a fine toothed comb. We simply can't stop them from doing so. That's how we got into these repeated PR messes after all. So let's embrace that. I think there's a good chance that some of those customers would solve our problems for us if only there was a way they could contribute fixes.
Like I said, experience is expensive. With experience comes ideas. Ideas are gold. That's why we're worried about our competitors after all. We don't really have any solid ideas. Neither do they. Even if we did have a solid idea, they'd create a competing idea or even just outright steal ours. And we'll still be left holding the bag, we'll still have these PR details for not getting things right in the first place. So let's turn that on its head.
If we open source our software, we give these technical people the opportunity to help us fix problems before they become problems. There's a ton of home brewers out there and some of them would love to be able to help our big brewery. We're not going to stop home brewers. So we shouldn't even try. But home brewers do need tools. Let them come up with their own recipes.
So, we provide the tools for free. But we can sell the recipe. Or, technically: provide a cheap service for the people who need something they know is secure but don't have the technical know-how and/or time to set it up themselves. Lawyers have a legal requirement to keep their conversations private. Schools have a legal requirement to keep their children safe from stalkers. Even citizens have a right to privacy. We'll make all of the tools available for anyone to audit and validate. The recipe to use those tools is where we make profit.
The recipe is the environment. We'll provide, for a fixed cost, the ingress bandwidth and compute needed. We'll provide secure storage of recorded conversations and an audit history of who's accessed it. We'll provide the experienced technical support to directly either fix problems or point at misconfigured devices outside of our control (and why it's the source of a problem); we'll be able to understand the debug logs that the software provides. Of course, any other technical person could too. But that's already the case so we're not really losing anything here. Indeed, we're gaining here. We're gaining the trust of law firms and governments; the trust that they're getting the value that they want for the services they need and that they can go directly to us if they need troubleshooting.
I'm not arguing against centralization. Centralization is good for us and for our customers. It's an anchor point for experience to grow from. I'm saying that open source software can help us avoid further technical problems from our lack of security experience. And who knows? Maybe some of those home brewers are interested in a paying job at our brewery -- if only they could prove they knew a little bit about beer, if it was free. We could definitely use the experience.
/pitch