Over the course of my career, the concept of “open source software” emerged from the cultures of academic research and hobbyists (which heavily overlapped in early years). It has now grown and been embraced by governments and corporations, and the concept has spread beyond software, to hardware, social processes, and politics.
This idea of open source, as well as a handful of super successful cases (Linux! Gnu C++!), have been heralded as major technical and social innovations. This rhetoric is often muddy, and incoherent.
Dirk Riehle writes in IEEE Computer summarizing the main categories of innovation as “legal, process, tool, and business models” ([1], p. 59)
The legal innovations are the well-know, if massively confusing, “open source licensing” for software. These licenses have been brilliantly organized by Creative Commons, and now can be applied with precision and finesse to lots of things besides code.
The process innovations pioneered decentralized collaboration and peer review. These methods employ digital network technology to implement some form of a self-organizing meritocracy to develop and maintain code that is “owned” by everybody. This approach is certainly a radical departure from centralized requirements driven software development. If nothing else, it is impossible to know what the actual product will actually become, because that depends on the emerging consensus of the developers. : – )
One of the huge successes of open source software has been in tool development, in two senses. Software tools are notoriously expensive to create and sustain, but access to good tools is essential. Many open source projects are tools that everybody needs.
Open source projects have also pioneered tools for collaborative development. These tools make it possible, indeed, easy, to create and run a distributed work group. Originally designed for code development, these tools have become the basis for a vast array of collaborations (for better or worse).
The fourth area of innovation emerges from the combination of the other thrusts into business models. There are plenty of controversies here, not least because some companies have chosen to torture the terminology, declaring their proprietary systems to be “open”, or even claiming private ownership of open source software.
At the base of these business controversies is money; how to economically sustain software and other products. “Free” is nice, but it doesn’t pay the bills. So how can the bills get paid? There are different approaches. Again, Creative Commons has some of the best analysis of these issues [2].
This article is a pretty reasonable description of the main contributions of open source software. These innovations are interconnected, but logically separate. You can release anything under an open source license, and you can use open source tools or processes for proprietary work. And that’s fine: you should fit the tools and practices to the project. (See Creative Commons [2.)
Most open source software (as is the case for software in general) is never finished let alone used. But “open source” has been a very significant innovation indeed: the concept of open source software has become a major cultural meme, called upon in many contexts.
For example, in early days, coworking was conceived as an “open source” work environment [3]. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies not only use open source software and methods, they enshrine decentralized “consensus” in the very core of the protocols (for better or worse). And, as noted, Creative Commons has extended the concepts to digital objects of all kinds.
- Dirk Riehle, The Innovations of Open Source. Computer, 52 (4):59-63, 2019. https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/2019/04/08690207/19ayGJpAxxK
- Paul Stacey and Sarah Hinchli Pearson, Made With Creative Commons. 2017, Ctrl+Alt+Delete Books: Copenhagen. https://creativecommons.org/made-with-cc/
- The Coworking Wiki, Coworking Manifesto (global – for the world) in The Coworking Wiki, 2015. http://wiki.coworking.org/w/page/35382594/Coworking%20Manifesto%20%28global%20-%20for%20the%20world%29
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