As Adam guessed, I have some opinions about this Jaron Lanier piece on open source software. Like most of what Lanier writes, mostly found it incoherent. Lanier makes extensive use of biological metaphors, but if we’re going to make an evolution metaphor, the messy open source development pattern certainly has more in common with evolution than the rigid hierarchy of a traditional proprietary development process.
But the real problem with Lanier’s essay is that I don’t think the question makes any sense in the way that he phrases it. He’s interested in the origins of “radical creativity.” But radical creativity is almost always the product of a brilliant individual or small group creating something new from scratch. For such an individual, the open-vs.-closed dichotomy doesn’t make a lot of sense. His ability to produce a breakthrough product (think Marc Andreesen with Netscape or Larry and Sergei with Google) doesn’t have anything to do with what license he plans to release it under upon completion. As it happens, a lot of innovative stuff is produced by for-profit companies, and for-profit companies often believe they can make more money releasing their product as a closed-source product than an open-source one. But any one of those companies could have released their products as open-source products, and indeed some for-profit companies do.
Where the open-versus-closed debate matters is what happens after version 1.0 is released. Generally speaking, open software provides a better platform for subsequent development than closed products. Proprietary software products are the captives of their initial developers. If the initial developers become incompetent or decide that continued development is no longer profitable, the entire ecosystem surrounding that product can die. As a result, building a product atop a proprietary foundation is always a huge risk.
Moreover, because of the way typical free software projects work, free software is much more likely to be designed for extensibility than proprietary software. This is one reason you see free software forming the foundation for so many proprietary software products. Mac OS X, for example, is a thin layer of proprietary eye candy atop a bunch of free software.
But the most important advantage of free software, and the one that’s especially important from a public policy perspective, is that releasing a given piece of software as free software produces more total societal wealth than releasing that same piece of software under a proprietary license. This follows directly from the definition: proprietary software is only used by those willing to pay the purchase price. Free software is available for everyone to use. Releasing a product as free software will always, on the margin, cause it to be used by more people, thereby increasing the total wealth of society.
Now, the obvious caveat is that in many cases a smaller fraction of that wealth is captured by the company that created the software. Mozilla, for example, is a wildly successful project, but very little of the value created by that project has flowed to the original Netscape shareholders that funded its initial development. But that’s a concern for the company and its shareholders. It’s not a concern for the rest of us. We can be sure that companies won’t pursue unprofitable business strategies for very long, so if open source isn’t a viable business strategy, the market will quickly take care of that.
But as public policy analysts concerned with promoting the interests of consumers and the economy as a whole, we should be more excited about business models that produce large positive spillovers for the general public than those that produce smaller spillovers. Proprietary and open source software both increase the size of the economic pie, and so we should celebrate both. But on the margin, open source software increases it more. Which is why I am relatively more enthusiastic about the growth of free software than proprietary software.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.