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It seems that Larry McVoy is skeptical about what can be accomplished with open-source software:

The open source guys can scrape together enough resources to reverse engineer stuff. That’s easy. It’s way cheaper to reverse engineer something than to create something new. But if the world goes to 100% open source, innovation goes to zero. The open source guys hate it when I say this, but it’s true.

As if to prove his point, someone recently did a comparison between Outlook and some major open-source alternatives.

Questions about what can be accomplished in open- and closed-source software projects are important and often overshadowed by dogma. It is true that most large and influential open-source projects succeed by providing a free and similarly-featured alternative to commercial software. I would place Linux, Apache, JBoss and Mysql in this category. At the same time, access to source code allows creative hackers to do strikingly new things with software. Greasemonkey is a great example of this behavior. However, I do agree with McVoy that few large-scale innovations come from open-source projects, which is logical given both the difficulty these projects have at raising capital and the decentralized leadership they demand.

Both innovation and imitation serve important economic functions. The former creates new technology, while the latter makes technology widely accessible. A number of recent trends have driven the software industry to be more focused on imitation in recent years. These include the influence of open standards and open-source software and corporations’ skepticism towards IT projects. This is probably healthy; I doubt we will ever see an IT company with the influence that IBM, Microsoft, Sun or Oracle had at their peak. But it also makes me wonder where the next round of groundbreaking innovation will happen. Will a large technology company approach a major problem (natural-language processing is one obvious choice) and produce a solution that is difficult to imitate (for either technical or legal reasons)? Or will applications distributed through the internet allow for individuals and smaller firms to proliferate interesting minor innovations? Maybe once open source products have caught up to commercial ones, the large open-source organizations will be redeployed to do work that is more distinctive?

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 28th, 2005 at 9:47 pm and is filed under , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.