| Open Source is al-Qaeda? (Or, Mr. Friedman's View of Open Source Software is Flat) |
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| Tuesday, 13 March 2007 | |
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On the whole I got the impression that Friedman doesn't quite trust Open Source--maybe because it's harder to understand from the corporatized, brand-name perspective he seems to view the world through. Also, I thought he gave too much space to Microsoft's blowhard and he didn't critique their comments enough. Take this quote from Bill Gates, which seems to me a little disingenuous: "[The Chinese] dream of starting a company. They are not thinking, 'I will be a barber during the day and do free software at night.' ... When you have a security crisis in your [software] system, you don't want to say, 'Where is the guy at the barbershop?'" For one, I would love to see a chart showing the average time to fix a security hole and the severity of the flaw, comparing proprietary systems like Windows against Open Source projects like Ubuntu. No contest, I'm sure. Second, it's possible to get professional service contracts for much Open Source software (as the model moves away from software towards services). Third, what's he got against barbers? He talked about how open protocols helped fuel the "flattening" of the world, enabling different systems to communicate through standard channels, but it seems to me that overall, his understanding of an "open protocol" is a corporate monopoly instead of an open standard. ("There is a big advantage to students and companies that you can go anywhere in the world today, fire up a computer, and find a standardized Microsoft Word program to write your business report or essay," he writes). But the kicker for me came a little further along when he warns: Devotees of the open-source movement will tell you that "the network" will establish new norms. This is true--up to a point. It is true that in the case, for instance, of the eBay community--a marketplace with virtually no walls, ceilings, or floors--the community adopted a system of norms by awarding one another stars for honest transactions and offering users the opportunity to provide feedback, making everyone's transactional history totally transparent to everyone in the community. The result was a framework encouraging good behavior that largely emerged from the community and is certainly maintained from the bottom up. But the open-source devotees are a little too glib when they say that the "network" always can be relied upon to establish these new norms. After all, al-Qaeda is a network, and the values it promotes are hardly enhancing of peace, tranquility, and the global community. Networks can also transmit rumors and lies faster than ever, and they don't always cure them right away...[Emphasis mine]
I'm not exactly sure why eBay and--just after this passage--a Wikipedia entry are examples of open-source networks, and it boggles my mind how he jumps from these to al-Qaeda. An open-source network can't be trusted because al-Qaeda is a network? That's like saying your mom's recipe for apple pie can't be trusted because the Anarchist's Cookbook has a recipe for explosives in it. Suffice it to say, I'm not quite sure what his point is here...he seems confused. And he doesn't say exactly who is to be trusted to create these new norms. Personally my vote is with the open-source communities, not the corporations. And not al-Qaeda.
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