From Red Hat to Twitter: Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, wants to make the microblogging site’s formula public. For developers, this means that the plan for how the site shows users content and ads will be available to everyone. Two weeks ago, Mr. Musk talked about his plan to make Twitter’s back-end rules public. He said, “I bought the world’s largest non-profit for $44B lol” in a tweet that read more like a lament. Someone asked him if he would open the platform’s code, and he cautiously said that he would. He told the more than 130 million people who follow him to expect “to be disappointed at first” when the rules become public. But he told them, “It will get better quickly.”
From the schedule he gave, it looks like Twitter’s algorithm is now open to developers. But this hasn’t happened yet, and Mr. Musk hasn’t said anything else. It’s not clear when writers will be able to see the list of rules.
A good choice?
To pay the $44 billion price tag, Tesla’s boss bought Twitter with a mix of cash and loans. The deal took away his title as the world’s richest person for a short time. He now has it back thanks to a rise in Tesla stock prices. Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index says he is once again at the top. He still has to pay the interest on the debt he used to buy Twitter, though. So why does it make sense for him to share Twitter’s formula with everyone? Or, based on his own tweet, did he really pay $44 billion for a non-profit?
Facebook is a huge social media site, but Twitter only has a few thousand users and doesn’t make a lot of money. A few hundred million people use its site every day. But for Mr. Musk, the best thing about the site was that it has a lot of users who are very active on it. What do you think? Can open source Twitter make the richest man in the world money?
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The move toward open source
First, let’s take a quick look at the past of free and open source software (FOSS). This will help us see the way forward. Almost all PC users today use paid operating systems (OS) to run their programs. With about 74% of the market, Microsoft’s Windows OS is the market leader. Apple’s MacOS comes in second with 15%. Only 3% of the market is made up of Linux.
But Linux is not a private OS like Windows or MacOS. Linux was made available for free download in 1991. It was created by a Finnish computer scientist named Linus Torvalds. Back then, giving developers access to source code was a pretty normal thing to do. This made it easier for people who know how to program computers to change Linux to fit their needs. It also helped make the code better. Other coders could build on Torvalds’ work because they had access to the Linux source code. By 1994, the first version of Linux had been launched, and developers were very interested in it. There was a lot of “free” software out there at this point, like Linux, Project GNU, and a bunch of other OS and tools.
A lot of well-known computer scientists also had very different ideas about whether software should be completely free. Because of these changes, there was a new way to give and get access to source codes. This was the start of the open-source movement. Along with it came the idea of putting together programs made by volunteers and paid software.
Red Hat’s way of doing business
Red Hat Inc. knew how to make money by selling something that is already free. In the mid-1990s, it was the first company to offer open-source software to businesses. Microsoft already sold its own software to businesses, so Red Hat’s business plan was a new way to make a software company.
The business worked a lot like companies that sell spring water in bottles. The natural resource was already open to everyone. To get people interested, though, they filtered the water and showed that it tasted better. But this package had one extra thing on it. Along with it, it came with extra services, apps, and documentation. Red Hat gave out Linux on CD-ROMs that had user guides and tools for installing it. There was also some technical help from the company. Linux became more popular in just a few years, and Red Hat got caught up in the IPO craze of the late 1990s. The stock value went through the roof when the company went public.
The sky-high value didn’t last long, though, as the stock market crashed during the dotcom bust. This made people wonder if open source was really a good way to run a business. Companies still used Linux after the crash, though, because the Internet core market needed open-source software more than ever.
Moving toward cloud technology
People who used PCs often bought proprietary software because it came with a lot of other programs and made it easy to share information with other users. But the server market was different. Businesses ran a lot of different apps on more than one platform. One software company would not be able to handle this. That’s why they liked the open source software that Red Hat provided. Red Hat wanted to make an enterprise-class server OS around the time it went public. In 2014, almost 15 years later, it was serving the next wave of datacenters and setting the stage for the future of cloud computing. The business made money by offering subscriptions and customer service. It didn’t have nearly as much market share as Microsoft, but it found a place for itself.
Some angel investors told Red Hat that its current business plan, which is based on open source, needs to be changed. They said that the Linux software provider wouldn’t be able to afford to invest in new ideas, so the open source community would have to come up with them. They instead talked about a mixed future in which open source software could be used as a base to create software as a service (SaaS) tools. In 2018, five years later, IBM paid $34 billion to buy Red Hat. This was done so that IBM could give a hybrid multi-cloud platform service based on open source technologies like Kubernetes and Linux.
What Twitter did
Elon Musk can make a whole new way to do business with open source by learning from Red Hat’s example. But to do that, he will have to look at the current business model with an open mind. That model is based on selling ads and channeling content. People who are developers will be able to change the formula once it is made public. This might cause a shift in its core personality. Though, when the test is over, a new model might show up. From now until then, the trip will be long, and Mr. Musk will have to pay interest.
