When IBM announced that they were selling their PC division to Lenevo I thought they were crazy. But I’ve now come to realize that it was probably the smartest move they’ve made in years. They have become big supporters on open source projeccts, with substantial programming contributions. Sun Microsystems has also made a big investment in open source projects. Their flagship solaris operating system in now OpenSolaris, a community open source project. And they paid $1 billion to acquire MySQL, the database behind much of today’s 2.0 web, also open source.
What do these companies gain from this committment to open source? Not sales — the software is available for free. They do sell services built around these products — training, help desk support, custom application development and the like. But even more they are participants in a vibrant community that is so committed to these products people give up weekends and evenings to make them better, and for free. The community talks freely about what is important, and proves it when people get behine ideas and develop solutions. No marketing surveys or focus groups needed — the community acts on what people believe is important. Good ideas rise quickly, bad ideas die quietly. Just giving software away for free isn’t good enough — what makes this open source thing so powerful, and beneficial for Sun and IBM is their participation in a vibrant, committed, active community.
Open CourseWare sites, and efforts like YouTube U feel more like just givin stuff away for free, without the community involvement. What does ‘open’ really mean? It requires giving up some, but not all, control of content creation. It requires allowing the community to freely adapt, re-mix, and re-purpose the product, as long as they freely share their creations and allow others the same rights. In fact you need to encourage this type of adptation, which, when it is good, can be pulled back into the original product to make it better and more suited to the demonstrated needs of the community. Steps are being made in the right direction, such as the release of many materials under a creative commons license. On YouTube U the videos can be embedded on other sites — but in a spot check of videos I didn’t find any that allowed text or video comments. Why no comments?
The whole open courseware effort is commendable, and a source of many high quality programs with excellent content. But until we are ready to give up some control and allow real community participation we miss the real benefits of being ‘open’.
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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