The Small Business Survival Committee's most recent CyberColumn suggests that the open source software movement threatens innovation and entrepreneurship:
- "Open-source software certainly is a competitor for Microsoft. But is it a sustainable form of competition? Indeed, open source generates some obvious questions. For example, are entrepreneurs, businesses and other innovators going to do their best work when they aren't creating their own property? Is security and troubleshooting best performed in such an open, non-proprietary setting? Anyone with a minimal understanding of economics will see that the answer to both questions is no.
For good measure, open-source software creates potentially significant liability risks for businesses choosing to use it. How do those providing and using open-source applications know that someone's intellectual property wasn't stolen and inserted? They really don't. Such lawsuits already have been brought, and it's easy to envision them spreading significantly.
If programmers want to spend time creating free software, and businesses want to cash in on this work, so be it. That's their decisions to make. But it doesn't stop there. Many in the open-source crowd, as the Times noted, "propose rewriting intellectual property laws worldwide to limit their scope in duration." In fact, many just simply want to do away with intellectual property rights altogether."
I thought this was an interesting post because it gives a common sense view of open source from a business perspective. No doubt all the Microsoft haters out there will disagree. But there are real pitfalls in relying on open source software.
Adapted from a post that first appeared on the author's weblog, Small Business Trends.
Article comments
1 - Casper
To take some issue with the economic point of view, if you accept the concept that software is a Gift Economy (here, here or here), then it does make economic sense.
2 - Anita Campbell
The gift economy is an "interesting" theory -- and just a theory.
Capitalism and cold hard cash still make the world go around. The Soviets and the Chinese figured that out, although it took each of those societies a half century for their economic experiments to go down in flames.
3 - Mark Saleski
when microsoft comes out with something that is:
a) rock solid
b) innovative
then perhaps this argument will have some merit.
4 - Nelson
Sister, the internet was built on open source software, and that's the innovation that made innovations such as blogging possible. See The Origins and Future of Open Source Software. It's pure insanity to claim that open source software cannot be innovative. In fact, if you study computing history, at one point in time ALL software was open source, and we somehow managed to innovate back then. Given the better understanding of open source's strengths and weaknesses that we have today, there is no reason to suppose that we cannot be at least as innovative today as the pioneers of the digital age were.