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This past week, Microsoft threw some of its weight into the Open Source software economy. Mary-Jo Foley reports on ZDNet:
A new, non-profit open-source foundation — one dedicated to increasing the participation of commercial-source vendors in the open-source world — is being unveiled on September 10. Microsoft is providing the initial funding and is a founding member of the new group, known as the CodePlex Foundation....
...While the CodePlex Foundation shares a similar name with Microsoft’s source-code repository-hosting site, CodePlex.org, the two are not merging. According to a FAQ on the Foundation’s site:
Microsoft’s “CodePlex.com launched in June of 2006 out of a need for a project hosting site that operated in a way that other forges didn’t – with features and structures that appealed to commercial software developers. The next chapter in solving for this challenge is the CodePlex Foundation (Codeplex.org). The Foundation is solving similar challenges; ultimately aiming to bring open source and commercial software developers together in a place where they can collaborate. This is absolutely independent from the project hosting site, but it is essentially trying to support the same mission.”
If you're skeptical, you are not alone.
(MIT's Technology Review magazine has an interesting article on open source Linux vs Microsoft. I'd share a snippet, but it's, um, not open.)
This news comes the same week it was learned that Apple open sourced Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch. Other companies like Google have also supported Open Source technologies to varying degrees.
Open Source is something of a new thing in most realms. But in principle, the concepts behind it have been around for centuries — in scientific research (before the modern proliferation of patents galore), for example, and in the practice of law (where laws and legal cases are there to be reviewed by anybody). But in many areas today, open source approaches take us out of our comfort zone.
But that's not preventing open source endeavors in all kinds of areas. Ivanka Majic writes on Balkan Witch
:
This week's edition of the IET magazine is The Open Source Issue. The arrival of my weekly magazine seemed to coincide beautifully with @leisa tweeting the question: "Why does open source matter"
In the magazine we have: open source biotechnology, open source cars, open source phones and the story of how AQA (a UK examination board) went open source.
"Open source biotech?", I hear you ask yourselves. Well, yes, I did wonder.
A designer on the (open source) Ubuntu Linux project, Ivanka Majic writes:
In my opinion, one of the most important aspects of open source principals is that open source represents the unencumbered flow of ideas. Imagine where the world might be if the first person to work out how to light a fire had done it in secret.
A close second is the idea that lots of brains working on the same problem is a good thing. Very few individuals are great enough to to be brilliant in isolation....
...Open source may not be the answer to all the world’s woes but it provides a framework for a freedom to collaborate on solving problems that affect all of us.
Open source efforts can be extremely challenging, not only because they often disrupt existing power centers — market leaders in business, power-wielders in government, and so on — but also because they are still led by people, and these people are usually in very loosely structured organizations ... if there's any organization at all.
In writing about the particular challenge of designing for Open Source projects (and Drupal, specifically), Leisa Reichelt writes in Johnny Holland magazine
:
Ah, communities. There are so many things mixed up in being a community that make communication challenging. There’s the fine line they walk between passion and hostility. There’s the ‘pecking order’ - earning your stripes, needing to be seen to know your stuff and be an expert. There’s group think, mob mentality, team spirit. There’s the imbalance that comes from the difference between the people who choose to post and those who choose to watch. There’s history - pages and pages and pages of history. Threads and issues opened and closed and reopened and reclosed.
It is complex stuff, it is easy to inflame, and incredibly difficult to predict.
Human dynamics. Now I want to say "Open source is people" but that makes me giggle.
And yet we push on.
And what about open sourcing government? The
