Expand open source reach

...does Open Source really kill innovation?

If there is one key theme most people debate when considering Open Source as a threat, this is most likely regarding innovation.

Read for instance the very good article in the Economist published this past week - Open but not usual - which quotes Steven Weber, a political scientist at the University of California Berkely and author of "The success of Open Source" stating that "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 knowldege."

The underlying idea behind such scepticism on the ability of an open source model - some sort of communal method of software development - to generate innovation, comes from the belief that innovation has value and if you have an innovative idea, you would rather pursue it for your own profit, than share it with the community and have no take in the resulting benefit. Afterall Bernard Mandeville told us centuries ago that it is better for society as a whole if we are acting as bees looking for our own profit blindlessly, didn't he?

Steven Weber is probably partly true. However it doesn't take into account the indirect impact Open Source can have on the industry as a whole. Take Firefox web browser for instance. That is true that it mostly reuses existing concepts. But the indirect - and positive effect - it has on innovation, is in pressuring Microsoft to move faster in developing and releasing a new, somewhat innovative Internet explorer 7 fearing for its rapidly eroding market share in the web browser market. Additionally, I think we can see all the extension modules being developed on top of Firefox as true example of innovation.

Another good example of how Open Source can push vendors innovation can be found in the article "Oracle: Open source keeps vendors on their toes" in Infoworld. Oracle purchased a few companies involved in producing Open Source software - Sleepycat and InnoDB - and is starting to feel some pressure from an Open Source database vendor, MySQL. It seems clear that Open Source by commoditising what already exists, push vendors to innovate so that they can keep charging businesses that are ready to pay a premium for getting the latest technology.

In conclusion, I would argue that Open Source contributes tremendously to innovation. If only in one way, that is by pushing software vendors to move away from offering "plain vanilla" type of software and bring in new features, new technologies faster and better. The on-going catching-up game between what Open Source can develop and what a professional vendor develops is key to innovation for the overall software industry, including the growing software as a service industry.

I believe that Open Source can innovate itself as well. I mentioned earlier the example of extensions in Firefox, which I haven't seen matched in any other browser. But I would also like to come back to the idea that Open Source is a some sort of a "communal method of developement". That reminds me very much of Kibbutz in Israel, those communes where anybody can come and stay as long as they work for the Kibbutz, no matter what are their skills. Kibbutz 40 years ago where solely farms. Today, many Kibbutz have become places where many new technology are sprouting. I wouldn't be surprised if in the same way, Open Source could become a crucible for software innovation.

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Tag: Innovation | Software | Open Source | Open Source Fusion | SQLFusion | Saas

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