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Debate: How do conservatives view the Open Source movement and software? (view source)
Revision as of 20:01, December 15, 2009
, 20:01, December 15, 2009→The Open Source movement and software is a good thing
:Also, Larry Wall, the father of the open source programming language perl, is an Evangelical Christian. I'm not sure of his personal politics, but that usually implies some degree of conservatism. [[User:ArthurA|ArthurA]] 12:12, 16 January 2009 (EST)
:Also, Larry Wall, the father of the open source programming language perl, is an Evangelical Christian. I'm not sure of his personal politics, but that usually implies some degree of conservatism. [[User:ArthurA|ArthurA]] 12:12, 16 January 2009 (EST)
:I don't see the value of citing whether prominent FOSS icons are politically conservative or not. Ultimately that is an appeal to authority, which fails as soon as you look at the politics of the undisputed founder of open source, Richard Stallman. That said, this is an important question which deserves a substantive response. As someone who has worked in software for hire and has used open source software for years, I offer the following observations from my personal experience in the commercial software sector:
:In response to [[User:Ieuan|Ieuan]], it is impossible to quantify how many users, sites, and businesses have adopted, extended, or been inspired by open source offerings, versus proprietary offerings, although I suspect the former easily outweighs the latter, especially when one looks at the number of attempted open source projects (which only represents what must be the relatively smaller "extended" & "inspired" categories) that release some level of working code, versus, the number of proprietary offerings. The selection available in FOSS circles is staggering in comparison. Most companies I know of are '''heavy''' adopters of FOSS.
:Ultimately I agree with Eric S. Raymond that FOSS is an example of the free market in action. There is no requirement of disclosure of intellectual property that is not voluntarily accepted by the code's author. No collectivist force at work seizing the property of a unwilling owner. The author's contribution and value is preserved and protected by every one of the various FOSS licenses: Recognition and Attribution is required in all cases, and often usage limitations are imposed upon the property's adopters and extenders. Two major FOSS licenses (e.g., GPL and the LGPL) impose strict restrictions upon any project that is based upon the code. (Not exactly "to each according to their needs"). In my view this fails the hallmark of collectivist behavior, which is the taking of an individual's personal property without their consent for the benefit of "the people" who had nothing to do with the production.
Secondly, the FOSS ecosystem has every characteristic of a robust "red in tooth and claw" market sector. The extraordinary pace with which Linux evolved from it's primitive debut in 1991 to an operating system that easily swamps Windows and OSX with options, features, security and innovation is breathtaking. FOSS projects are the basis of sector dominating server products: Apache displaced AOL and IIS in the web server space, PostgreSQL exceeds most major DB vendors in advanced OODBMS technical capability, and MySQL is the only DB that offers multiple engines and table formats within the same schema (and comes very close to matching the legendary performance of Oracle). BerkleyDB and SQLite largely created and dominate the embedded database segment. Virtually every important scripting language (Perl, Python, Ruby, and PHP) are wildly successful FOSS projects, which have in turn radically changed software development practices). Indeed, the dominant "Agile" software development methodology is based on principles pioneered in FOSS projects. (These principles are explained in Eric S. Raymond's seminal work, "The Cathedral & the Bazaar".) Linux is the only major OS that is distributed by at least 20 different vendors, and comes multiple graphical interfaces that can be found on a bewildering variety of form factors.
What drives this competition, if not market forces? It's more than merely bragging rights and reputation. Plainly said, there are many individual who started wildly successful FOSS projects that probably would not have been nearly so successful in the traditional corporate environment. These people become highly sought after in the commercial industry because of the credibility they bring to those who hire them. The fact is that many of these successful FOSS projects attract significant monetary investment from educational institutions, large corporations and even governments is another indication of high monetary value that end-users place upon complete open source. In the end most adopters know that they gain far more by using code that others, including their competitors can use, than trying to recreate it from scratch, and that is not even scratching the surface of businesses that built their model around FOSS software.