Where does Open Source go?
Many times I hear something along the lines of “the free software philosophy is the ideal world, and the best way to get there is by adopting open source philosophy and methodology.”
I’m suprised anyone thinks this.
Open Source will not arrive at a 100% Free Software, because it doesn’t say that ‘closed source’ is wrong. It just says that in some cases, free software can make higher quality software, and in other casees, if you feel proprietary software can make higher quality software, that’s fine too.
I am about to do an MA in Typeface Design, and fonts is one such thing that an open source process is laughable for. But I will publish my fonts as Free Software, because that is the good, right, ethical, upstanding thing to do.
Similarly, there’s been a lot of discussion in my local GNU/Linux User Group about how ‘open source’ may or may not make sense for a highly technical manufacturing industry. While generally free software will inevitably yeild higher quality software, in many niche area it won’t be inevitable - but its still the right thing to do.
Advanced mathematical typesetting is another such subject. Its so niche that proprietary developers took decades to do anything useful for that area of life. But one smart guy wrote the first and last word in mathematical typesetting - Donald Knuth and TeX - and once he’d climbed over the crest of the initial hill, a vista of awesome typesetting opened up in front of mathematicians worldwide.
Well, I don’t really like to talk much about open source. It’s a shallower view of the work that we do. Where we say that software must – ethically must – respect your freedom, and respect specifically your freedom to co-operate with other people, and as a community take control of your computers, they just say , that if people let you look at the source code and change it, it’ll make the software technically better. Well, that may be true, but it’s less important. Imagine people arguing whether free elections, where everyone’s allowed to vote, would be better or worse for the economy. They’re missing the point.
As for this bunk about free software being anti-business, well, that’s another story :-)
The Where does Open Source go? by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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