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The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more.The famous computer scientist Bill Joy once said, No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else. If you want to build something on the bleeding edge, you must have an open ecosystem that can pull in as many ideas as possible, skills and talents that exist beyond the four walls of your office building. This is the ethos of open source, the idea that the world is open for collaboration and that diverse people working together can create something beyond themselves.Sadly, weve lost much of this ethos over the past 30 to 40 years. Even though the digital world is built upon open source, almost none of it is open for collaboration today.Recently, open-source providers have come under fire for charging for certain open-source features. Accusations have ranged from spoiling the spirit of open source to offering loss leaders (free solutions that lock customers into APIs or networking effects that are essentially bait for higher-cost features).To explain why this is false, I must explain how weve strayed from the original open-source ethos and why charging large enterprises for certain features is imperative to creating a sustainable path forward.How we lost the open-source ethosBefore open source, the term free software was used. It had a sort of anti-capitalist, anti-economic bent. In the 90s, a contingent of people came in and rebranded that as open source, forming an institute called the Open Source Initiative, opening the doors to the masses.When the internet began connecting people of all stripes and backgrounds, the open-source movement exploded. The fundamentals were simple: Anyone, anywhere could take source code, tweak it, and contribute back to the community.Today, the notion that the computational infrastructure for the world should be open for collaborative remixing and the idea that people, whether theyre startup founders or garage coders looking to tinker and customize, can work together has been largely lost.To prove it, simply try customizing your email or web browser. Even though these solutions are largely built using open-source code and operating systems, the second you make any change, all the DRM encryption protocols break down, rendering you unable to listen to music on Spotify or watch videos on YouTube.The spirit of collaboration is goneHow did we lose this spirit of collaboration? Part of this shift is simply the evolving nature of software. It used to be you either uploaded or downloaded a program to your computer, and you could inspect the source code. Now, software is hosted and rendered via web browsers and user interfaces, meaning major cloud service providers can use all kinds of open-source code, but they never have to reveal it or share it with the community if they dont want to.This isnt to finger wag. Many cloud providers contribute amazing things to the open-source community. Indeed, their solutions are open in the sense that theyre free to the public. Theyre not open in that they dont accept community contributions, and they certainly wouldnt tolerate someone taking their source code and remixing it, aka forking.Finally, theres an existential clash between enterprises and maintainers, the volunteers responsible for overseeing open-source projects. When enterprise IT departments need something fixed, they call their vendor and work through the kinks.You cant do that with an open-source community. Demanding work from volunteers doesnt go over well. And besides, community maintainers dont understand enterprise needsnot in the intimate way businesses need. Thats because the open-source community wasnt born in a corporate office. It was a grassroots movement of coders wanting to create powerful, novel things.Maintaining the open-source movement requires understanding the needs of this community and the enterprises that now rely on these solutions. The solution providers that can understand both sides and thread the needle between their different needs and motivations will be the foundations of a sustainable path forward.Protect the innovation commonsThe term commons originates from economicsa kind of open resource thats shared and managed by the community. You can think of it as an Alpine pasture or a vibrant lake sustaining a village. Its precious but vulnerable.The innovation commons is the open-source community. If someone overfishes, overgrazes, or pollutes the commons, it harms everyone else. So, its in everyones interest to protect the commons.Open source has become increasingly expensive to sustain. For any provider, the path of least resistance is to close down the commons and sell anything valuable as a proprietary artifact. But its much more abundant to keep the commons open to as many people as possible, allowing them to benefit and contribute.As stewards of the innovation commons, rather than trying to sell every single tree, its much better if we pick some fruit and bring it to a storefronta stand at the side of the community garden. If enterprises roll up with two-ton trucks and want to take their fill of fruit and vegetables, we can absolutely give it to them and charge money to invest back into the commons to nurse a sick tree or restore fallow ground.From the outside, charging enterprises for certain open-source features may look like the same thing as selling loss leaders. However, there are a million unsexy but fundamental things required to maintain an open-source ecosystem. Bridging the gap between what the volunteer community can provide and what enterprises desperately need fuels these essential components of future innovations.Asking enterprises to pay for much-needed benefits like security, optimization, and real-time notifications is not equivalent to selling them open-source solutions with bells and whistles. Its a mutually beneficial relationship that grows the innovation commons while providing targeted solutions to companies core needs.For example, many enterprises work with older versions of Python. Tech enablers can use our expertise to apply bug fixes and security patches to these older versions, capabilities that wouldnt be possible otherwise. In turn, using those enterprise resources, we can continue shipping thousands of pieces of open source to people for free, maintaining the original spirit of open source and protecting the innovation commons.Today, less than 1% of the worlds population can write any kind of code, but AI will bring the rest of the world along. Can you imagine the potential when the other 99% can collaborate in an open environment by simply using natural language or modular tools? I can. And, Im infinitely excited for what the future holds.Peter Wang is the chief AI and innovation officer and cofounder of Anaconda.
