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Above in this comment thread: Economist Article on Open Source

Andy's Comments

Posted by astein at 2006-03-17 11:32 AM

I read an interesting article in The Economist today. It addresses the value of the Open Source “collaborative process”. Some of these concepts were briefly addressed in my presentation to the group on February 2.

It is a 5 page article and you may not have the time for it. Here is a quote of the few, most significant paragraphs with potential applicability to us:

“Rather than a democracy, open source looks like a Darwinian meritocracy. The tools for extremely productive online collaboration exist. What is still missing are ways to “identify and deploy not just manpower, but expertise,” says Beth Noveck of New York University Law School (who is applying open-source practices to scrutinising software-patent applications, with an eye to invalidating dubious ones). In other words, even though open-source is egalitarian at the contributor level it can nevertheless be elitist when it comes to accepting contributions. In this way, many open-source projects look more hierarchical than the corporate organograms the approach is supposed to have torn up.

Even if the cracks in the management of open source can be plugged by some fairly straightforward organisational controls, might it nevertheless remain only a niche activity—occupying, essentially, the space between a corporation and a commune? There are two doubts about its staying power.

The first is how innovative it can remain in the long run. Indeed, open source might already have reached a self-limiting state, says Steven Weber, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, and author of “The Success of Open Source” (Harvard University Press, 2004). “Linux is good at doing what other things already have done, but more cheaply—but can it do anything new? Wikipedia is an assembly of already-known knowledge,” he says.

The second doubt is whether the motivation of contributors can be sustained. Companies are good at getting people to rise at dawn for a day's dreary labour. But the benefit of open-source approaches is that they can tap into a far larger pool of resources essentially at no cost. Once the early successes are established, it is not clear that the projects can maintain their momentum, says Christian Alhert, the director of Openbusiness.cc, which examines the feasibility of applying open-source practices to commercial ventures.

But there are arguments in favour of open source, too. Ronald Coase, a Nobel prize-winning economist, noted that firms will handle internally what it would otherwise cost more to do externally through the market. The open-source approach seems to turn this insight on its head and it does so thanks to the near-zero cost of shipping around data. A world in which communication is costly favours collaborators working alongside each other; in a world in which it is essentially free, they can be in separate organisations in the four corners of the earth.

Perhaps that is why open source is taking up a permanent place as a facet of modern business. As open source begins to look more corporate, corporations themselves are looking to adopt and adapt more open-source practices.”

The two “limitations” suggested above I would address as follows:

1) Can “the Open Source process” do anything new, can it innovate? The answer may be negative, I am not sure. We as an organization can always innovate, without relying on the “community” to deliver those innovations to us. It is the other part of the quote that interests me: “Linux is good at doing what other things already have done, but more cheaply … Wikipedia is an assembly of already-known knowledge”. If we can do more cheaply the “already invented and well established” business of local government in the style of Linux and Wikipedia, we would have saved money.

2) Can we sustain the motivation of contributors? In our case, the contributors would be other local governments who share the cost of developing or maintaining a common software application. Out of more then 50 local governments in Virginia and more then 20,000 in the US, I believe it is likely that we will find a small group which is equally concerned with the escalating cost of software and is willing to collaborate and save.

I am not offering this article as “proof” that Open Source is “the way to go”. Nor am I inviting a debate on the subject. In my judgment, adopting a collaborative process, where applicable, is the best opportunity I am aware of that could potentially limit the increase in our software costs in the future. Open Source is one popular collaborative model, but it is not the only one.

"Open Source" Facts (for those who may not already know)

Posted by Anonymous User at 2007-04-24 12:34 AM

Originally, the Open Source Definition "started life as a policy document of the Debian GNU/Linux Distribution. There are many inclusive licenses in the realm of Open Source Software. All of the licenses that are noted by this work have one feature in common which is "they each disclaim all warranties." The intention of this disclaimer is the protection of the owner of the software from liability connected to the software program." This is considered to be reasonable in that there is not sufficient revenue from the program for liability insurance and legal fees to be funded. Open source software is defined as software containing no royalty or other fee imposed upon the redistribution of the software; the source code is available; unlike with published essays or books, the right to create modifications and derivative works exists; it may require modified versions to be distributed as the original version plus patches, there is no discrimination against persons or groups contained in the software as well as no discrimination against fields of endeavor; all rights granted must flow through to and with redistributed versions; the license applies to the program as a whole and each of its components, and the license must not restrict the other software thus permitting the distribution of open source and closed source software together. Open source software is defined as: any software program that has a source code which is made available for its' use or modification as developers or other users see fit and it is generally developed in the manner of public collaboration and thereby made available freely. Open Source is also a certification mark that is owned by the OSI or Open Source Initiative and it is intended to be share both freely and even as an improved and redistributed version by others who abide by the distribution terms of the Open Source Initiative's Definition. This software is such that may be distributed or redistributed to other parties without any encumbrances of restrictions. Furthermore the source code must be available for the party receiving the software to possess the capability of improvement or modification of the software.

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I think the way any open source project develops can be elitist. At the start look at Linux. It was a one man show and some friends. He opened it to develop and other folks started to contribute. So at the start the process can be elitist but it does open up. Look at Wordpress the ultimate blog platform. Well thats my read on the situation.

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