The spirit of open source has been distributed in uncountable subforms and interpretations and the "all for free intentions" of the web community have without a doubt contributed greatly to people's ability to access and work with digital media. However, not everything should be free - people have to eat and it's also nice for a family father to take his kids to the movies from time to time. If everything is free, how can twe earn our living?
When looking at some research studies on open-source, we find the common consensus that open source development is in no way near free. In fact, large contributers to open source products are corporations who employ core developers and contributers. The Linux operating system is to a large extent made available to people through integrators like RedHat or Suse - these companys commercially aggregate and enrich open source programs.
The same is the case for Drupal or Joomla. These two popular webCMS benefit greatly from the participation of companies that develop and sell Extensions commercially. For 3rd party developers the incentive is to create a unique extension that earns recognition whithin the community and to make it available for free to the public in order to get public awareness. It is finally not much less than advertisement for development skills.
Beyond delivering a message of competence to consumers and the market, open source production comes hand in hand with additional benefits, often referred to open innovation (google the names of Erich von Hippel and Georg von Krogh to find their papers). Releasing a product freely attracts morepeople that use it and thus leads to a higher number of people actively interacting with the product. More interaction leads to more ideas and ideas shape the basis for every innovation. Open innovation lives from the customer - it aims at establishing a lasting communication scheme between the consumers and producers where both parties exchange insights and mutually profit from ideas that result from their communicative interactions.
Making software and information free is in my eyes a good development since computers and programs will constitute the main tools with which we access and produce our core resource, i.e. digital knowledge, in the future. Furthermore, as mentioned, it is a driving force for innovative ideas.
Traditionally, we have recognized that if the access to these digital resources is restricted, firms can exploit their competitive advantage and build up fortunes through the sale of their resources. Microsoft is the most prominent example of exploiting digital knowledge advantages and in web2.0 we have already (e.g. youtube) seen and are about to experience many more examples.
Making digital knowledge freely available means to make this advantage available for everyone. For companies there is a tradeoff between exploiting their competitive advantage on the one hand and gaining recogntion, intensifying customer contact and collecting ideas for innovation on the other hand. Giving away products for free does not make open innovation yet - knowledge about the product has to be made available. In the case of software this means giving away the software for free is not open innovation, the source code must be available as well.
The initial spirit behind Open Source is that everyone should have equal chances, which includes the chance to access software that makes us more productive and the access to relevant qualified information so we can have access to equal ieducation opportunities. This often stands in conflict with monetary benefits that can be gained through exploiting the competitive advantage one may have.
We should choose a way in the middle. While many problems in society worldwide notably stem from economic actors that pursue an unbalanced strategy in exploiting their competitive advantage, handing everything away for free cannot be the answer. The reason is simple: The economic engine which can act as an incredible driver for producing goods (as opposed to bads) functions only based on exploiting protected knowledge advantages.
Examples of the destruction of nature have lighted the TV screens in the 1990ies, today we are more and more faced with climatic changes that have been accelerated by waste products in our production of goods. Many have asked whether come common products can actually be called goods if they produce more negative externality effects than they produce benefit. Undoubtedly, we are only learning to steer the economic forces more intelligently.
Economics is like a machine or a tool that can be employed by humans to create massive achievements for the benefit of others. However, we must learn about the system in which we are in in two ways. First, we must learn about the system dynamics and second we must reflect on the possibilities we have to actually define the system itself.
Since we are the actors in the system, we can influence it but as a consequence of our roles as actors we are also influenced by the system. There is a apparent endogeneity problem. Fact is, economies can spur the wealth of people. Fact is also, that businesses who act in such a system can create unprecedented innovations that make us more knowledgeable and let us achieve higher efficiency in daily interactions.
Be it transportation or communication, we can achieve great things just by giving a financial incentive so that people fully engage in their mutual activities in order to produce a common good which allows other people to live or work better. It's fascinating really! It would be great to use that potential for the development of software and information for a common good.
There are many approaches, mainly in the form oflicensing types which have tried to reconcile commercial and free development. My personal opinion is that we should allow for commercial exploitation of software that is being developed but after a time make that knowledge available to everyone. The classic patent form does something similar: By getting a patent you actually disclose your knowledge openly and everyone can access it. for a certain time, you as the patent holder are granted the right to exploit the economic opportunities that arise from this knowledge. Everyone who uses the knowledge in the same way is punishable by law.
Unfortunately, things in software are different than say with car engines. Engines can be opened and looked into in any case, with software that is not necessarily granted. The addition of the internet as distributor and aggregator of software comes in as another complicating factor, but the idea of a timely granted restricted exploitation period seems to be a good enough motivator forinnovators from which the public eventually profits as well.
We must continue to look for new models, and they are being found every day. Service-oriented models have been developed where access to support is timely restricted and charged. The source code of some Joomla extensions for example is licensed under GPL, however, access to support documents is only possible via monthly memberships or other timely restrictions.
Not only are models found in software, but also in the case of information: Some blog authors have published and sold e-books to their audiences. while traditional authors retain a minimal fraction of the sales price of a book, blog authors retain almost the full sales price. This way, people can profit from comparatively lower sales in equal ways. The published e-books are mainly either directed at the broad audience or at a very narrow specialist group. After an initial period, the e-book is then available for free to everyone. Purchasers of the book are not necessarily worse off since they enjoyed an information advantage over the non-readers for a timely restricted period.
A degree of urgency in the need for delivered information can be a measure on how long timely restrictions should be upheld. It is thus likely that we can find higher margins and higher restriction periods mostly in very specific information classes- information for specialists.
The above mentioned were just two examples that can allow free access to the same resources and thus fairness in equal chances. The main reason why a commercial development is needed is that economic forces act as great motivators for real goods that can do a lot of people a lot of good. In a digital world, we must take advantage of that to spur the developments of goods. On the other hand we must ensure that people from all backgrounds have equal chances to build upon the body of knowledge of human kind. We should all have the same possibilities to get relevant, well structured information so we can educate ourselves and reach our goals no matter of economic circumstances.
We must recognize, however, that we tend to want things done too fast. Here as with any other economic activity, we will have to develop and learn so that what we do and how we do it becomes meaningful and well reflected with respect to influencing others with our actions. We can only achieve this if we keep information free in one way or another. We have now witnessed some ways, there will be many others. Our goal should always be to achieve a balance between the two opposing stakes of society.
Post new comment