Media Times Review Blog

Red Herring

Bloged in Economy, People, Technology by Milen Nedev Saturday November 26, 2005

By Adam L. Penenberg, Slate

Don’t listen to Bill Gates. The open-source movement isn’t communism.

This month, SAP’s Shai Agassi referred to open-source software as “intellectual property socialism.” In January, Bill Gates suggested that free-software developers are communists. A few years earlier, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called the open-source operating system Linux “a cancer.” Considering what these guys say in public, I wonder what dark words they utter in private—that al-Qaida uses open-source software to plot terrorist attacks?

The philosophy behind open-source software is simple. Instead of zealously protecting source code—the blood and guts of any computer program—open source encourages any programmer to tear apart the code and build it back up again. The theory is that this collaborative process encourages innovation and decreases bugs by increasing the number of people with a stake in the project.

That anyone with an Internet connection can pop open the hood doesn’t mean companies that use open-source programming can’t make money. Red Hat does. So do Sleepycat, Sun, and many others. Ballmer and company don’t object to open source because they think it’s an economic loser. They can’t stomach the fact that the enterprising creator has no more control over his code than any other Tom, Dick, and Harriet. Not only can more than one company rake in the dough, the other guys can alter your product any way they see fit, as long as they share these upgrades with everyone else. That’s where the socialism rap comes in.

Microsoft views its source code as a trade secret. When it outsources application design to other companies, it supplies only the section of code the programmers need to accomplish their limited tasks. The company protects its programs with heavy encryption from competitors who may want to reverse-engineer it. Gates’ thinking: You wouldn’t expect Coca-Cola to share its recipe with Pepsi, and you shouldn’t expect Microsoft to share its secret formula, either.

Read the full article: http://www.slate.com/id/2130798/

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