Why open source is unsustainable (Financial Times) [LWN.net]

Why open source is unsustainable (Financial Times)

Posted Nov 5, 2004 15:31 UTC (Fri) by OnTheLevel (guest, #25868)
Parent article: Why open source is unsustainable (Financial Times)

As a student of economics, a proponent of open source software, and a developer, let me say this. Let's face it...writing your everyday spreadsheet application while not easy, is not rocket science. Still, during the early 90's several people wanted to believe that every peice of software they wrote was the best, most inovative piece of software ever written. When in truth, your average CS graduate student probably writes more sofisticated code in their sleep - and rarely utilizes it beyond personal use and gratification (and if they do really accomplish something truely innovative, the university would immediately latch on and suck the life out of it). So, what the majority of economists do since they really have no idea how software works or how it is created, is try to come up with a set of rules, using emperical data, to deal with this new entity in the economy. The only problem is how do you make rules for something that does not seem to respond to the major variables used in projecting future conditions. Open source software is just this. You cannot acurately estimate the amount of resources that have been put into developing a piece of open source software. Nor can you estimate the future value of a peice of open source software. So, they have absolutely no idea what it's value is. The problem is that economists need to start thinking of open source, and for that matter intellectual property, as something that is trading on a market who's value is not assesed in dollars. What is great about open source is that it helps turn ideas into a commodity. This thought scares the crap out of big business since 80-90% of thier workforce surrounds the notion that they are selling some extremely original idea. Without software patents, businesses would become incredibly efficient due to the enormous amount of competition in the market. Only those companies who truely knew what they were doing, would make it. But, I digress. This is no doubt an idealogical argument and I don't really believe it could or would happen. And, to be honest, probably would not be a good thing since millions of people would loose their jobs.
The good news is that open source is here to stay. It is supported by thousands of people, universities and even coorporations. And, it helps fight the efforts of those philandering rober barrons who want to hord and profit from ideas that are not truely inovative. I don't think that all software will eventually be open source, but as long as the open source community exists and continually puts presure on organizations like Microsoft, things like the "dot-com bubble" will not happen again because the value of intellectual property will be kept at some sort of resonable level.

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