When open source means open slather

DAZZLING new business model or zealot-driven commercial suicide? The open source software movement has been called both.

This is the wild country where the law of intellectual property protection is rejected completely. In fact to be a part of the open source gang, you have to agree to give up any exclusive claim to owning the commercial rights to your work.

It is a radical idea in any business environment, nonetheless Linux — probably the best known example of open software — had 27 per cent of the world’s server operating systems market last year, snapping at the heals of Microsoft’s Windows with 41 per cent.

Microsoft has dubbed open source as an “intellectual property killer” and, looking at these numbers, it is not surprised they get a little tetchy.

In fact the different approaches underline the radically different cultures extremely well. Microsoft — and thousands of other companies — work to capture and then guard zealously all the intellectual property they can.

At the heart of the open source movement is a General Public Licence, which says that developers can do whatever they want with any open source software — including sell their own versions — as long as they make their work available to the wider developer community.

The wide use and acceptance of Linux is the clearest illustration of the power several hundred skilled workers, linked together over the Internet can have in developing an horrendously complex but working operating system.

Software developers understand this complexity, even if the rest of us may take it for granted, and acknowledge that “patches” — corrections to operating bugs — are always going to be necessary. This drive from programmers to see software run better is the foundation stone of the open source movement.

And as the complexity of software, along with a lot of other technologies, increases rapidly, a growing number of players from the big end of town are starting to recognise the value in this open and widely distributed approach.

Increasingly users see the open approach as a way to tackle the complexity so they can get the best software — with as few bugs as possible — quickly. IBM has announced it will spend US$1 billion this year to develop Linux to the point where it can be used to run any device from mainframes to personal digital assistants.

Having been a player in the operating system market, the Big Blue now sees itself as the provider of e-business solutions and is just looking for the best way to deliver it. Having gotten out of making shovels it now just wants to find the source of the best ones.

Having grown up knowing that property is the key to value, letting everyone have a piece of it sounds completely counter intuitive. But maybe we are still thinking in terms of the physical world.

In that world I cannot hit a couple of keys on my keyboard and reproduce my car and deliver it to you anywhere. In a digital world I can do just that with information or knowledge stored digitally and worth thousands or even millions of dollars. As information and knowledge become ever more important where is the line in our current businesses?



* Peter Morris is Principal of Telesis Communications, a technology strategy consultancy www.telesis.com.au or contact: morris@telesis.com.au.