Enterprise open source Toolkit

In association with Network Liberation Movement

Story: What vendors really mean by 'open source'

Posted by: Andrew Meredith (Tuesday 6 January 2009, 7:18 PM)

The Ratchet Effect

: Only time will tell if the open source community
: is building a house of cards.

This sort of commentry is mired in assumptions based on the nature of proprietary software development. The author may have read the characteristics that go into the phrase Open Source, but has failed the think through the subtle but fundamental differences that they cause.

One seems to be the assumption that when an open source based business goes under the same thing happens as when a closed source business goes under. You need to remember that the source code of the product the company was offering was, is and will continue to be freely available for others to use. When a proprietary firm dies, the chances are pretty high that the code will never be seen again, or if it is, this will be because a single company picks it up and then has to trog through the IPR of the various contributers to see what they can actually use and how much they have to pay to who to do so. Please believe me, this is a monstrous task and will mean that great chunks of the code get chucked because the IPR are too tangled up to sensibly use.

The ratchet effect seen in many walks of life is also present here. Open Source code doesn't die. Once a particular, function, library whatever, has been (well) written it never *need* be written again. In the proprietary world, the wheel has been reinvented so many times it beggars belief. I have worked in both sectors, the differences in this alone are alarming.

Businesses are about many things, but one of the key issues is the companies ability to do it's thing efficiently. Rewritting/testing/debugging the same function over and over again just isn't efficient.

So, it may or may not be a house of cards, but if it is, they're very firmly stapled together by the licensing and any cards that do fall off can quickly be reused in the next house.

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