October 10th, 2008
Open source is about belief in code
You can read stories about doom and depression somewhere else today.
(This classic 1873 cartoon of Wall Street being swept clean by panic, drawn by Frank Bellows, is part of the American History Social Project.)
Instead I want you to look across the headlines to the other side of the chasm.
There is something there that does not exist in the proprietary wreckage, something important. Code.
Even if an open source enterprise should go belly-up its code should survive. That code can be enhanced, it can be forked, it can be turned into another business, perhaps with another business model, down the road.
The code will be there because those who forged both the FOSS and open source movements believed first in what they could do for code, and only second in what code could do for them.
While proprietary business models may be based on a belief in the market, and a hope it will reward them, open source is based on something deeper, a belief in people and the work good code can do when it is shared.
The code will make you free. It’s free code. Build something with it. Add to it and (if it’s GPL code) bring those enhancements back so can build the stack higher.
Opponents of the open source movement like to call this socialism, even communism, but this principle of sharing is at the heart of every major religion.
Open source companies may die but they always leave something important behind, something their successors can work on and use.
After every collapse, under the open source principle, we start from a higher level. What looks in the proprietary world like rubble is, in an open source world, gold ore.
This may sound like pollyanna to you now, but it’s important and, best of all, real. If your faith in Wall Street has been shaken, remember that in open source you’re not starting at ground zero but on a higher level of code.
Open source was made for times like this. You don’t have to believe in it. Just use it.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 10/10/08
