Open Source Is Dead -- Long Live Open Source!

Only a Pawn in McNealy's Anti-Microsoft Game

Despite the obvious advantage of collaborative development, Byron is not bullish on the future of open source. He lists a number of reasons why it will just be a footnote in the history of technology.

Most controversial, I think, is Byron's assertion that "the [open source] community was a mostly unwitting pawn in a 10-year marketing and political/regulatory campaign to attack Microsoft and promote the market capitalization of other public companies. The detour in software development best-practice improvement and new software functionality that resulted has harmed the software industry as a whole a lot more than it harmed Microsoft."

He continues: "It's the 'us vs. them' thing over intellectual property, this or that vendor's choice of how to market its products and/or services, OOXML, and other useless open standards activity, degrees of quality control, 'Halloween memos,' SCO Unix, free vs. open, and especially Microsoft ad nauseum that has left the open-source concept an asterisk in what historians will write about the by-then dormant software industry in 2050."

For all its apparent success, open source software is still just a tiny percentage of overall software spending, "an asterisk on an asterisk," Byron says.

All in all, says Byron, software is becoming marginalized as more and more code winds up embedded in appliances. If there is any chance to reverse that trend, counsels Byron, the open source movement needs to recapture the era before Microsoft and (to quote Unix pioneer Dennis Ritchie) "preserve [more than a good] environment in which to do programming, but a system around which a fellowship could form."

If Open Source Is Soon to Be History, So Is Microsoft

Curtis is fun to read. I love his opening anecdote about his first meeting with Bill Gates. "He stood in the yard of his Washington lake-front home, Diet Coke in hand, a tastefully small ketchup stain on his shirt, which no one had the courage to point out, and answered our questions, in turn, like a savant."

Years later, he was less impressed with Microsoft and quit out of boredom after 11 years with the company. Now he thinks it's "toast," and likens proprietary software to alchemy. "The difference between free and non-free or proprietary software is similar to the divide between science and alchemy. Before science, there was alchemy, where people guarded their ideas because they wanted to corner the market on the mechanisms used to convert lead into gold."

Curtis has a lot more to say, particularly about the development process. Check it out. (When I first posted this column, I linked to a site that allowed free download of his book. Curtis has asked me to change the link so it points to a paid version; after all, a writer's got to make a living.)

And remember, I'm not an advocate of any of the positions referenced here. But I am an advocate of debate and I suggest you follow the links in this post to get the perspectives of our geek virtual panel at more length.

I welcome your comments, tips, and suggestions. Reach me at bill.snyder@sbcglobal.net.