Opinions

Digg This!

"Linux is good at doing what other things already have done, but more cheaply - but can it do anything new?" That is the question asked by Steven Weber, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, and author of "The Success of Open Source" (Harvard University Press, 2004), in a "Special Report" dated March 16 published in The Economist this week.

Open source, Weber suggests, might have reached what he terms "a self-limiting state."

Although such an opinion strongly suggests that neither Weber or The Economist is aware of things like BitTorrent, that hasn't of course stopped it from doing the rounds of the Internet, especially at the author leaps on the anti-Wikipedia bandwagon by quoting professor Weber as saying, dismissively, as a further example of what he deems to be lack of open source innovation:

"Wikipedia is an assembly of already-known knowledge."

And here, it seems to me, we run into a classic problem. For the good professor clearly believes Wikipedia's recent problems corroborates the doubts and fears of those who, as the author of The Economist puts it, "question how something built by the wisdom of crowds can become anything other than mob rule." But surely Jimmy Wales and company aren't exemplifying Open Source methodology in Wikipedia so much as the attempt to aggregate knowledge collectively through an open content management system?

In other words it's an example of groupware rather than of Open Source.

What The Economist article heralds, then, is not so much a questioning of the innovation-levels within the open source software movement, as an inflexion point in the generalist discussion about Open Source, the very definition of which is about to change, if The Economist has its way.

The key passage is here [my emphasis]:

"Though the term [i.e., "open source"] at first described a model of software development (where the underlying programming code is open to inspection, modification and redistribution), the approach has moved far beyond its origins."

The author continues:

"From legal research to biotechnology, open-business practices have emerged as a mainstream way for collaboration to happen online. New business models are being built around commercialising open-source wares, by bundling them in other products or services. Though these might not contain any software "source code," the "open-source" label can now apply more broadly to all sorts of endeavour that amalgamate the contributions of private individuals to create something that, in effect, becomes freely available to all."

It is this switching of the points on his train of thought that prompts the author to write next that, in his view, "it is unclear how innovative and sustainable open source can ultimately be."

Although the article cites Firefox and MySQL as two examples of "just how powerful the open-source method can be," there is a substantial passage about SCO which seems totally uninformed by anything that has been written or said about the SCO vs IBM case in the past two years.

And to round things off, if any further indication were needed as to where the author's allegiances lie, The Economist article ends with a quote not from Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, or anyone of that ilk. No, it ends with the words of Microsoft's Bill Hilf:

"Even Microsoft has increasingly made some products open to outside review, and released certain code, such as for installing software, free of charge under licensing terms whereby it can be used provided enhancements are shared. 'We have quite a few programs in Microsoft where we take software and distribute it to the community in an open-source way,' gushes Bill Hilf, director of platform technology strategy at the company. Open source could enjoy no more flattering tribute than that."

All in all this is one of the least useful articles purportedly about Open Source that I can remember reading in the past three years.