The Broad Wave of Open Source
| posted by Don JarrellOpen Source is an exciting, dynamic drama on several fronts -- society, law, development (NOT just software), economics, organizational dynamics and motivation, purposefulness, generational culture, and more.
From a background in commercial software product management (not an attorney), I've been looking at the impacts of Open Source that go beyond the GPL, Linux and SourceForge, which leads me to believe that the possibilities and impacts are enormous. However, maximal realization will take a cooperative effort among polarized factions -- commercial IP rights holders (such as proprietary software companies), and those who understand the power of purposeful (non-monetized) group effort and the economic value of building a "commons" of code, knowledge and other accretive public assets. There are several approaches and analogies that serve these ideas that may make for interesting exchanges here during BlogJam 2005. First, a look at motive...
Genuine Purposefulness
The dot-com segment crash, and its enormous consumption of capital taught us (hopefully) that, faced with a huge pile of cash, otherwise reasonable people can convince themselves to do stupid things. By contrast, contributors of code to Open Source projects not only are not directly paid for their code, but they participate only when truly convinced of the value of the workproduct. They are both developers and (mostly) targeted users. Naturally, the first major Open Source projects produced development tools due to that motivation. But as more and more of the population at large learns technical skills in software development and tools, accountants, librarians, and restaurateurs are enabled to serve their own needs and interests in software. Taken further, a wide variety of non-enterprise communities of interest are discovering the feasibility of using volunteer spirit and skills -- just as they have done for fund-raising, meeting planning and organizational administration -- to develop and maintain software for their internal needs, at very modest costs.
Similarly, cost conscious businesses have come to understand the same principal, as their managers, office workers, and factory workers can now produce valuable software. This expansion of technical skills will continue to blur the line between programmer and non-programmer. And, there is a growing interest in Open Source like cooperative production in music, publishing, and several other fields of creative endeavor.
Agree? How do you see your skills and/or connection to software -- or other creative development -- in your work evolving?
