Romantic, Old-School Open Source Notions Abound
by Sam Dean - Oct. 16, 2009Comments (0)- Related Blog Posts
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Gartner analyst Brian Prentice and Zack Urlocker writing for InfoWorld have both posted thoughtful takes on open source's place in the world now that big proprietary software vendors are scooping open source players up. "The fact that there are so many members of the 'open source community' ready to sell out – now that’s interesting," writes Prentice. "Well, actually," he adds, "it’s interesting only to the extent you still believe the romantic narrative that commonly circulates around Open Source. That story involves bands of fiercely independent geek-heroes." Actually, what's interesting to me is that a lot of people do still believe that kind of thing.
Prentice describes the romantic notion that many people have of open source coders:
"Armed only with an Eclipse IDE, a weekend’s supply of Jolt Cola for energy and a poster of Jean-Luc Picard for inspiration, they set out to usurp the big software companies in their attempt to control the software universe."
Surprisingly, while Prentice's description has some jaunty exaggeration and imagination to it, a lot of people do have the types of views he describes. Recently I was talking to a well-known person in the tech journalism field about open source, which he described as "very technical stuff," and "outside the reach of most of our readers." I wanted to ask him if he used Firefox and if he thought that his readers might too.
Gartner has predicted that 80 percent of proprietary software will include open source components, and some people believe that 100 percent of it will. As Urlocker notes, "for those who are trying to run an open source business, it is clear that pragmatism, rather than puritanical beliefs, is key to business growth." Of course people behind open source projects sell to proprietary players if the price is right. That's not selling out in the negative sense of the term. It's pragmatic business. It is indeed amazing how many off-base notions people still have about open source and the community surrounding it.
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