John Mark Walker has a provocatively-titled piece There is no open-source community in OnLAMP. In fact it’s deliberately provocative because it’s misleading – that isn’t what his article is about. He argues that the philosophical trappings of open-source / free software are an unnecessary burden. The internet has enabled zero-cost software mass distribution and has opened up programming and quality checking / feedback to the masses. As a result, economic forces – not RMS’s philosophy – dictate software prices will plummet, and the only logical recourse for a programmer is to open up the source.

Looking at open source from an economic perspective, it becomes clear that Linux or its equivalent was bound to happen eventually, regardless of whether Linus decided to release a kernel in 1991 … The view that there is a core group of altruistic companies and true believers driving open source forward is simply false.

Walker’s article is useful in helping de-bunk the myth that open-source grew out of philosophical discussions in the late 1990s. Open-source is in fact fifty years old, and has its origins not in hippy hackers but in boring commercial IBM mainframe users. De-bunking some of these myths might indeed help the wider uptake of open-source software.

However, even after allowing for some errors of fact in the article, I don’t believe that this blind inevitability of economics holds water. I think Carr’s Does IT Matter? was much closer to the truth. Once software proliferates it becomes a commodity. Once it becomes a commodity it ceases to deliver competitive advantage. Once it does that, organisations will seek to minimise their cost of acquisition and open-source suddenly becomes appealing.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 22nd, 2006 at 9:08 pm and is filed under Open-source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.