It doesn't matter that open source software (OSS) is not innovative - Open Source Software Up the Stack

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January 07, 2008
It doesn't matter that open source software (OSS) is not innovative

The open source software (OSS) blogosphere, amid the slow news period that always surrounds major holidays, has had no alternatives the last few weeks except to get tied up in knots over a Discover article that claims OSS inhibits innovation. There are many thoughtful responses on the Net, such as this one on Ars Technica. There is also the usual ranting of the OSS fringe and Free Software Foundation (FSF) members when anything negative about OSS is released.

I don't know the Discover article author's work. He is credited with coining the term virtual reality (VR), and that has never been part of my research focus. He founded a VR company called VPL whose IP was evenutally acquired by Sun. I found a very interesting interview on the Sun site where he uses some pretty obtuse terminology to say, as I have said, that software development is still a cottage industry, whether it be closed- or open-source software. My only connection to him is that he is said to have been involved with the great VR-oriented film, Minority Report, (although I tend to think more of MIT's John Underkoffler in this context).

According to the Discover article Lanier shared the same MIT/Cambridge timewarp as the FSF's Richard Stallman. Relative to OSS, it looks like Lanier is positioning himself as the anti-Stallman. His criticism of movements such as OSS is not a new area of criticism for him. He has penned pieces criticizing Wikipedia and like efforts as "Digital Maoism" and undue technology devotion in general as misguided totalitarianism and collectivsim.

So putting all of the politics and historical background aside, what does his Discover article really say about OSS and innovation? I don't think he says much about OSS at all other than that non-IT-related scientific pursuits should not follow the OSS development model. According to Lanier, other areas of scientfic research such as synthetic biology should stick to such things as focused teams of scientists and rigorous peer review. He gives one example of closed-source-software innovation--the iPhone--that I don't think of as very innovative. He gives another--Google's algorithms--that are really sort of OSS in that they were developed while the Google meisters were Stanford students (the algorithms are not really OSS of course because Stanford patented them but they were developed in the OSS model).

So I guess it depends on what Lanier's other scienfitic pursuits are trying to accomplish. As planned by those that fund the OSS movement, the OSS development model is all about commoditizing software functionality. Innovation is not the objective; shining up Unix was the objective in the 1990s as was improving the application server concept this decade. Now shining up the applications layer of the software stack is next. As long as you realize that OSS is doing exactly what is expected of it by the folks that fund it, criticism about innovation is unfounded.