Jousting with the Open Source movement
"The [General Public License] poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization making use of it."
- Craig Mundie, Microsoft vice president
By now you're probably aware of the firestorm unleashed by Microsoft Vice President Craig Mundie. He recently castigated the open source movement and the GNU General Public License as basically un-American while touting Microsoft's new "Shared Source" initiative, by which Redmond would let certain software partners access source code for viewing, but not modifying. Everyone, it seems, was out for Mundie's head.
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In response, the high priests of open source (Richard Stallman, Tim O'Reilly, Eric Raymond, Linus Torvalds et al.) agreed with an open letter written by sometime writer, programmer and gadfly Bruce Perens castigating Mundie and Microsoft.
According to Perens, "The success of the open source model arises from copyright holders relaxing their control." That's like saying someone who's chugged a quart of vodka is "relaxed." Open source requires the copyright holder to relinquish all control - to give up any rights to the intellectual property.
This supposedly leads to "free" software. But as our intrepid band of software liberationists tell us, "Free refers to liberty, not price." (I have this image of applications locked up in tiny cages with Stallman leading a midnight raid to liberate the code.)
Guys, software isn't people. Software doesn't need, nor enjoy, liberty. People need freedom.
When it comes to software, people - especially business people, but also home users - want applications that work.
Open source is fine for geeks. I've been part of the open source movement myself (in my younger days). I went through an epiphany similar to the one Eric Raymond describes in The Cathedral and The Bazaar, but the geeks-only phase of computing is gone. Long gone and gone forever.
The open source movement is, essentially, communistic (small "c") at heart, and that sets it opposite the traditional American entrepreneurial spirit. Perhaps "un-American" is too strong, but perhaps it isn't.
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Dave Kearns is a writer and consultant in Silicon Valley. His most recent book is "Peter Norton's Complete Guide to Networks" published by SAMS. Dave's company, Virtual Quill, provides content services to network vendors: books, manuals, white papers, lectures and seminars, marketing, technical marketing and support documents. Virtual Quill provides "words to sell by..." Find out more at www.vquill.com/ or by e-mail at info@vquill.com
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