Why Open Source

Corporates come and go, and their products go with them. IBM was once synonymous with everything computing. They lost out to Microsoft¹. Nokia² was once synonymous with phones. Microsoft bought them, the Windows phone tanked,and Nokia nearly went with it.

One way to avoid losing software is to open its source, meaning ‘making it available to anyone to modify’ under licence.

Bill Gates knows better than anyone that Corporates and their software can disappear: he saw off IBM. One of its products, OS/2, barely survived, but it is still out there, used primarily by banks for ATMs. Can’t be that bad, right?

Plenty of IT experts thought it was way better than Microsoft’s offering, but it made no difference. Business is risk-paranoid, and support will always migrate to the biggest seller. It becomes the standard. That’s how .doc and later .docx became the ‘standard’. .docx will be around for a long time, but not forever. Microsoft, like most large corporates, lived by the sword, and we all know there are consequences.

Nobody got fired

WordPerfect was once way ahead of Microsoft Word: its spreadsheet, Quattro Pro, was also better than Excel, and its Paradox database was way better than Microsoft Access. Thousands of companies still use it, especially law firms and small firms, but, unless the source code is opened, it will disappear with its owners. The expression Nobody got fired for buying IBM explains why WordPerfect went out of vogue. Managers, who themselves are often ignorant about software (their secretaries use it, not them), buy anything they think they won’t be fired for. It has nothing to do with how good the product is.

I am not surprised to read that Bill Gates is dumping shares of his old company, but I do not infer that he thinks Windows is in decline. He surely has his reasons.

Microsoft itself is becoming infamous for annoying users. Toward the end of 2025, there were fairly constant on line reports of software updates bricking laptop computers. This is likely to not only annoy people, but it wastes days of work, costs a lot in support, and will cause them to look for alternatives.

As always, it comes down to money. Lenovo, the firm that famously took over manufacturing PCs for IBM, has now made Windows 11 a paid extra on some of its latest laptops. Together with other costs levied by Microsoft, it just costs them too much time, money and effort for support. Mr Gates must surely have noted that. I can’t speak for him, but I think the writing is on the wall. If I had MSFT shares, I would dump them too.

Who pays for Open Source Software?

Most normally, large corporations pay large membership fees to software foundations. Think of it as a large co-op or stokvel. The software is usually free to individuals, but money is made out of installations, servicing and maintenance for large corporates. The principle is that corporates pay less than they would to develop their own, but also that the way they pay is predictable, regular and budgeted. That satisfies accountants and keeps things predictable.

Non Profit?

Corporate history shows there is no profit to be made by keeping a development team permanently. They soon become a solution looking for a problem. Development teams are per-project. They are not like mechanical engineering teams. ‘Trains and boats and planes’ constantly need improvements, so keeping teams of engineers makes sense. Software projects are short-lived.

Once an IT project is completed, its large (sometimes world-wide) teams are discarded. However, since the rise of unions, corporates gather a bad name for discarding staff, however they spin it:

layoffs, retrenchments, dismissals, firings, ’letting them go’³.

One way of avoiding that is to have no development team at all. That is where supporting open source foundations make sense. Hackers believed that the tools we use should be free, and that became another aspect of free software: free to use, and ‘free as in beer’, but that is a happy side effect of the open source model.

Where to, Windows?

Windows is heading for the cloud. In other words, it will be functionally the same as Google. Microsoft 360 with Copilot will be similar to Google Workplace with Gemini. Hardware will not sell with the usual stack of apps. Instead, it will become a web terminal, like a Chromebook, and users are more likely to want battery life than sheer number-crunching power, so laptops will migrate toward ARM processors ⁴. Current models with ARM processors are all reaching battery life approaching or exceeding 20 hours.

Word .docx format as a standard will not disappear, but it won’t matter: already there are concerns about phones and AI, with some schools banning use of cellphones while in class.There are concerns that education is down in every metric compared with the past. A current primary school pupil, adroit as s/he may be with making TikTok movies, will grow into teens and beyong with little or no interest in word processing formats.

Desktops

Desktops are changing very day. I like a big black clunker next to my desk, but there is a trend toward small Mini-PC boxes mounted on the back of monitors. They save space and perform as well as or better than laptops. Recently, hobbyists built PCs inside keyboards, as Commodore did with its 64 model. HP has released its own, the EliteBoard. Is carrying a keyboard easier than carrying a keyboard? Possibly, if you know there is a screen at work and at home. Sometimes things catch on just because people want a change, but nothing beats laptop independence: no need to worry there will be no screen where you find yourself.

A change could just as likely to be keeping both screen and keyboard in both places and hooking the phone up to be the PC:

Hardware habits

Time will tell. It took a long time for corporates to buy laptops for workers, but they changed nearly completely when they did. The old black PC tower is seldom seen today. Hardware habits die hard. Using your phone as a PC as done in the video is still rather a kludge. Most users will not be tempted.

That is not to say employers will not. They may have reasons to want to purchase a phone for you: not all models will be able to successfully connect, and corporates usually want control. If this tech enables that, they may want to supply ‘standard’ phones for employees. They love that sort of uniformity. When you leave, you leave your phone behind, but … there will be a policy in place to back up your phone daily (during lunch break, or at a scheduled time to suit their servers). Their priority will surely be to completely own your work data.

There is a general trend toward Open Source usage. How hardware changes fit with that trend will be interesting. Even now, OnlyOffice is free for use, and is widely regarded as simpler and easier to use than Word 365. I have tried it with Cryptpad for collaborative document editing, and they get it right.