Why open source did not change the world!

My little Google Alert thing pointed me to a web site called Worldchanging this morning, triggered by an article called The Open Source Movement.  The article in turn says (among other things):

"...the future is here, it's just not well-distributed yet. The answer to our problems is not to redistribute wealth, it's to redistribute the future. In very practical terms, that's what the open source (OS) movement is doing."

In the midst of my trying to wade throught this heavy thinking, it took a few minutes to figure out that the article, although posted September 3, 2008, was five years old. Apparently the author, also editor of Worldchanging, hasn't circled around in the last five years to find out what has been happening in the open source software (OSS) movement.

So, how has that 'open source will redistribute the future' thing worked out? The 2003 premise was that if developing nations adopted and built 'IT infrastructure' based on open source software their children would be smart and happy, their economies would bloom, they would no longer be economically repressed by the developed world, and a lot of other good things.

It didn't happen of course (which makes you wonder why it was republished?) but open source software should not be blamed. Open source when it comes to software is basically a contractual issue. The author and the articles he quotes make a mistake assuming any particular technology can have a geography associated with it (he says developing countries have a need for a “home-spun technology”).  Ideas cannot be stopped at borders. He makes a bigger mistake mixing up software licenses with technology. Open source is not a technology, it is a term of a software license.

Even with the author’s use of what appears to be a 2003 Microsoft software cost that is too high by a factor of 50, at least vs. what was available in the market in 2005, software is a noise-level percentage of the overall cost of the “IT infrastructure” that developing countries theoretically need. To get where the author apparently wants to go, he will also need free or open source hardware, content providers, communications services, electric utilities, buildings, and most important staffing.

All the home-spun natives he envisions coding away building open source skill sets would like to get paid I assume. Although, based on other non-IT-related postings on WorldChanging, I am actually not sure if that is the author’s intent or if he perceives the newly minted developers enslaved in some kind of IT equivalent of a Chinese sweat-shop factory making kids’ toys and dog food.

He provides as an example a decision by China to use Linux on some servers announced back before 2003. But all the idealism about Linux and China didn’t quite happen (see http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=525) either.

And the young people mentioned in fact wanted cash, not utopia, and have come to or are trying to get to developed countries as fast as possible. But if they choose to make the knowledge they have gained or their intellectual property free, there are no impediments in IP law prohibiting that.  

Unfortunately there is still some of this nonsensical logic floating around the European Union.  I'll check back there in a few years and see how that worked out.