Open Source: Open for Thinking, Open for Business

O’Reilly’s Open Source convention (OSCON) in Portland followed by LinuxWorld in San Francisco were like star spangled siblings each celebrating the visionary sparkle and practical promise of Open Source.

Each sibling sported a distinct personality. OSCON pulled in the gurus and hackers of the Open Source and Free Software community while LinuxWorld attracted the giants of the computer industry rejuvenated by new markets opening up to Open Source.

“Changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators”

At OSCON, the more cerebral of the sibling conferences, Tim O’Reilly singled out new transformative technologies that are catalyzing the future. To a crowd fond of sandals and Apple iBooks, O’Reilly talked about social networking applications like Orkut and Friendster, online book and music brokers such as Safari, iTunes and Amazon, as well as other services which have become integral parts of everyone’s online life – Google, Mapquest and eBay. The seamless integration from the handheld to the server makes the Internet the platform for this participatory universe. As if to lead by example, blogs and wikis were part of every facet of OSCON – with developers, speakers, and journalists reporting the details of their immediate experiences and reactions at the conference simultaneously and wirelessly to the world.

Igniting Innovation

At LinuxWorld, the sibling wearing the suit, corporate leaders still seemed to remember the fundamental tenets of open source – community and innovation – in passionate keynotes from Matt Szulik, Red Hat’s CEO, and Nick Donofrio, IBM’s Senior Vice President for Technology and Manufacturing.

Szulik emphasized the importance of reform in US patent law to protect the spark of continued innovation. In addition, he argued for the necessity of economic sharing by US companies to grow the global technology market. Szulik also remembered, with great pleasure, his hour long meeting with President of India APJ Kalam earlier this year, where Dr. Kalam talked of his goal of boosting education in India with open source software. Szulik noted that US schools lag far behind in doing the same.

In his keynote, Donofrio proclaimed that Linux and open source software development are igniting the spark of innovation “like no other thing in computing has done before”. He pointed to the importance of industry, government and educators working together to maintain this flame of creativity. Donofrio’s widely reported statement that IBM will not use patents against Linux drew mixed emotions from a wary open source community but he challenged other vendors to follow IBM’s example.

Patent Warfare

Like IBM, HP and Red Hat addressed the patent issue and warned against hostile vendors who were stockpiling thousands of patents to use against Linux and open source software. In an interview at LinuxWorld, Szulik voiced great concern that patent warfare by Microsoft could lead to choking of new technology and inhibit the growth of Linux. The threat of litigation and copyright infringement combined with arsenals of patents would stifle the creativity of every knowledge-creator. Separately, Martin Fink of HP warned that potential liability from US DMCA laws, which govern protection of copyrighted multimedia content, forced HP to bundle proprietary DVD software with its new, otherwise open source, Linux laptop.

Building New Markets

Despite their different personalities, there was a lot of optimism at both events. In this growing world of suits and sandals running on collaboration and innovation, new companies – MySQL, Zend, Zope, Red Hat, Ximian (now part of Novell) – as well as old companies – HP, IBM, Sun – and foundations – OSDL, Mozilla, Apache – have become OSS stars. With undiminished idealism, some look to writing top notch code, others look to making serious money and all look to changing the world order through open source software. So what’s wrong with that? Join the party and make a change too.