Learning From the FOSS-il Record

When you study the progress of humanity wending its way through pre-civilization and later civilization, you begin to notice that it’s the little changes over time that are the most important.

Throughout prehistory, before farming and cities were invented, hunter-gatherers quite cleverly adapted to the local environments they found themselves in. With a little luck, they managed to exploit the resources they needed to survive. But, unlike modern man, they lived in and from their world and did not seek to change it. Then, starting with farming, and later with the more advanced tools of civilization, humanity has tried to change, perhaps irreparably, the world around it. It has become increasingly clear that the critical challenges facing modern peoples across the world, like controlling global warming and pursuing peaceful international relations, now require everyone’s effort working together.

In the early days of free software, at the dawn of reciprocity and collaborative coding methods, FOSS was a software hunter-gatherer’s paradise. Over several generations of developers, new forms of discipline and organization gradually emerged. Large-scale software farming had arrived in the form of successful distributions like Red Hat, SUSE and Ubuntu, as well as in the form of agribusiness giants like HP and IBM. Today, the business of FOSS is dominated by farming. Most good developers have found jobs on the best farms — Google, Yahoo, IBM, HP, Intel, Fujitsu, as well as influential non-profits like the Linux Foundation, and countless others. The signature influence of a few garage developers scrounging for resources has long since vanished. Yet the spirit of hunter-gatherers continues to provide inspiration for innovation, rather like a venture capitalist’s dream of instant wealth, where the hard work of farming and civilization takes place only after IPO. Consequently, while the big players in today’s FOSS civilization are busy farming and changing their world, they are at the same time being careful to sustain a strong and vibrant ad-hoc developer community and are always on the lookout for new ideas and areas to invest in.

“It’s the slow changes in the software and technology environment that will rewrite the technology business for everyone.”

Similarly, without dwelling too much on the details, it can easily be seen that the proprietary software community has its own wide-ranging mix of hunter-gatherers and large scale agribusinesses. But it’s a little less friendly — dog eats dog, big fish eats little fish and survival is a dicey business at best.

Nonetheless it’s the slow changes in the software and technology environment that will rewrite the technology business for everyone. The foremost change is the bit-by-bit, but ultimately unstoppable, digitization of the developing world’s economies. In terms of its vast human intellectual resources, the developing world will finally eclipse the smaller populations of the developed economies. It is this climate change of global knowledge warming that will raise the level of the software and technology oceans that are fundamentally shared by everyone. Any low lying fields of vested interests stuck on the shores of the developed world are likely to be the first submerged.

The correct answer is not to slow the progress of global intellectual warming, but to create fields of expertise, talent and knowledge that are buoyant. Fields that have genuine links through the up and coming tide to the new hunter-gatherers as well as new large-scale farming communities and centers of civilization. Existing fields can then rise together with those of the new participants. A rigid strategy of lock-in or lock-out will only sink today’s developed economies. Open source and open standards (and open technology, in general) can provide a better way to build the strong links of collaboration and mutual respect that will be needed to float in an exponentially expanded, multi-cultural technology world. Then everyone together can face and meet the challenges that changing the world inevitably brings along with it.