Analysis: Why care about open source?

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By Ryan Underwood

(IDG) -- The ongoing spat between the open-source movement and its detractors is not really about some David-and-Goliath battle in which a big hairy giant is struggling to protect its monopolistic profits from honest, hard-working gearheads who just want to keep things all about the technology.

While the David-and-Goliath story does make for good headlines, the open-source debate really concerns something much more important: The future development of Internet technology in all its various forms.

For Web publishers, for e-business managers, for e-marketers, the debate has everything to do with how rapidly the sophistication of Internet-based technologies will evolve and little or nothing to do with whether or not consumers and companies will be gouged on IT prices.

Just because open-source code is at one level free it generally takes immense resources to make the leap from hacking around with freeware to developing a viable product for the marketplace. Even in a situation where it takes virtually nothing to go from freeware to commercial development, someone will figure out a way to turn a profit. That's just the way business works and it's not going to change because source code is or is not publicly available.

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But that's an argument some heavy hitters in the industry don't buy. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer railed against Linux -- by now the poster child of the open source movement -- in a recent interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, calling the freely available operating system, "a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual-property sense to everything it touches."

Ballmer's view is absurd. Open-source advocates are hardly a bunch of naive left-leaning anti-business techies who want to give their potentially lucrative work away to anybody who wants it. Actually, the open-source movement is more akin to a hybrid community of academic researchers and corporate R&D staffers. What motivates these hackers (which, for those who don't already know, is not a pejorative term) is the chance to understand and tinker with all kinds of programming and development projects. Open-source software poses about as much of a threat to corporate profits as do articles that appear in the New England Journal of Medicine to hospitals and biomedical companies. Actually, think about what kind of shape hospitals and biomed companies would be in if no research journals existed, or if sharing medical knowledge was treated as some subversive activity.

In IT development, there's a sort of "compounding" effect that occurs when technical knowledge is shared freely. Development feeds on itself, so that as the amount of technical work that gets carried out in a public domain grows, the technology becomes more and more sophisticated at an increasingly fast rate. And it's from these developmental roots that true innovation flourishes. If person-to-person communication had been left solely to proprietary industries over the years, we probably wouldn't have email today, much less telephones. We'd have better mail or designer smoke signals, perhaps.

Open source has given the world TCP/IP, email and Web servers, among an innumerable list of other groundbreaking technologies. What innovations have resulted from a walled-up, "closed-source" environment like the one Ballmer seems to want? Well, let's see, we did get "Clippy," the insistent paper clip tour guide that unfortunately found its way into a string of MS Office releases.

Perhaps one of the most compelling recent illustrations of the power of open-source comes not with Linux but with XML. The markup language was created, says Jon Bosak, chair of the W3C's XML coordination group, "In large part by a desire to ensure that the Web of the future would not be dominated by standards controlled by a single vendor or nation." And despite XML being "free," plenty of companies make buckets of money selling cutting-edge products or services that draw on XML. Even Microsoft, open source's most aggressive antagonist, has put XML at the center of its sweeping .Net strategy.

Of course, like everything, the open-source debate has many shades of gray. Programs generally are not totally open-source or totally closed-source. Macromedia, for example, does a great job of maintaining an open API in Dreamweaver that allows users to contribute a whole range of extensions they've developed on their own. At the same time the software includes plenty of safeguards to protect it against outright piracy. The advantage in that strategy is obvious: Whenever new versions of Dreamweaver are released, the decisions about what goes or stays aren't made by a small, isolated group of staff programmers. The decisions get made, ostensibly, by the users who have guided the development of the application through their contributions of code. Such a process makes for products that become much more useful and relevant in release after release as opposed to, say, getting an enhanced version of Clippy.