Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

A fascinating experiment in enlightened anarchism and free enterprise is taking place in cyberspace, called "Open Source". Using the Internet as a distributed development environment, an unknown number of self-motivated individuals and corporations have become involved in a unique self-organizing effort that could well redefine the computer software industry.

The products and principles of Open Source have even attracted the attention of the mainstream media. The prime time TV news covered the release of the latest Linux kernel, and Hollywood found a variation on the theme useful as part of the main plot line in one of its latest celluloid fantasies.

Of course, the media doesn't really understand what Open Source is all about - which I suppose shouldn't be all that surprising since the software industry is having a hard time figuring it out as well. Some people see the unruly Open Source mob as barbarians at the gate, while others see them as liberators, and eagerly anticipate the emancipation of all software from the tyranny of the evil capitalist robber barons. The reality is somewhere in between.

Technically, Open Source is just a set of clauses in a license agreement. (Source refers to the human readable computer source code that is written by programmers.) What makes Open Source so hard to define are the complex ways these clauses change the legal, economic, and intellectual property equation for software developed, distributed, and used under the Open Source license.

Perhaps the best known Open Source project is the Linux operating system. A computer's operating system provides the "environment" in which the application software - the programs that actually perform tasks for the user - have to run. A typical computer will have dozens of applications, but only one operating system. As originally envisioned, an operating system provided the standard infrastructure - or level playing field - in which applications competed to best serve the user's needs.

In theory, when all competitors play by the same rules, those software developers that write the best programs will succeed on the merits of their products. Users benefit from the constant struggle to win their business by providing better solutions for their problems.

However, the theory breaks down when the industry "standard" is a closed proprietary operating system under the control of one of the competitors in the applications market. The "standard" then becomes more valuable as a means of suppressing competition for the owner's inferior application products, than as an independent commercial product itself. As such, closed proprietary standards tend to become far more effective obstacles to progress than stepping stones to a better world.

The artificial authority and control provided by closed proprietary "standards" have given us nearly two decades of costly operating system "upgrades" that have relentlessly expanded in complexity, compromised our privacy and the security of our personal information, and required the purchase of ever more powerful hardware. But these "upgrades" have been little more than endless repackagings of the mouse driven graphic interface Zerox pioneered back in the 1980's. Monopoly control over the desktop operating system marketplace has utterly failed to produce meaningful progress toward making computers intuitively obvious and easy to use for the average individual. In fact, many argue that the effect has been exactly the opposite - that the primary effect of monopoly control has been to stifle innovation and obstruct progress.

In stark contrast to the lack of meaningful progress in the heavily manipulated desktop software market, anarchism and enlightened self-interest have given us an Internet that has already exceeded even the wildest dreams of its original creators. The Internet opened a new dimension to human communication that continues to evolve and diversify in unexpected ways.

Not surprisingly, the Internet's freedom from authoritarian constraints has been under constant attack by those seeking to divert its boundless creative energies to their own uses, or curb the free flow of information that threatens the lies and deceits that have been so useful in manipulating the uninformed. Perhaps the most insidious attacks have been efforts to break the open standards that are the core of the Internet's success, and replace them with intentionally incompatible "extensions" that only work properly with a single company's inferior products.

An increasing percentage of computer users are becoming dissatisfied with the bloated, unstable, and hard to use products of institutionalized incompetence. They are also becoming increasingly offended by venal manipulations of the software marketplace that allow third-rate products to dominate, while the superior products of smaller competitors are driven off the market by artificial factors that have nothing to do with their ability to deliver value to consumers.

Open Source provides a framework for preserving the Internet's freedom from authoritarian constraints, and expanding that freedom into the general software market, by creating a new digital infrastructure that is open and available to everyone, yet owned and controlled by no one.

The primary criterion of Open Source is that the source code must be distributed with the product. This openness results in two very useful dynamics. When programmers know that other programmers are going to be reading their code, they tend to write better software than when their sloppy, inefficient kludges can be anonymously hidden behind a pretty interface and ever more powerful hardware requirements. And when there are flaws in the code, hundreds of eyes - motivated by a self-interested desire to make the code work so they can use it themselves - will likely find the flaw faster than a single set of eyes that have reread the same lines of code hundreds of times without spotting the missing comma, or recognizing the logical paradox that results in a memory leak.

As a true believer in free enterprise capitalism, my first question has to be: how does anyone make enough money from Open Source to survive in the software business if the software is freely available? Why would anyone make the investment in creative effort to write software they would have to give away for free to their competitors? Why would customers buy software from any business if they can simply download it for free from the Internet? Extolling the virtues of writing software for the pure aesthetic joy of creation is fine for tenured university professors, but a business has to make money to survive - aesthetic pleasures won't make the payroll or pay the rent. There are a lot of hardcore profit-driven corporations getting involved in Open Source development, so there must be a buck to be made somewhere.

One of the attractions of Open Source for commercial software developers is that the Open Source license was crafted to be compatible with a mix of open and proprietary software. Open Source provides a mechanism for competitors to cooperate in the development of truly open standards, and a superior high performance digital infrastructure - an infrastructure that, because the details of its inner workings are available to everyone, is free of hidden "undocumented features" that give unfair advantage to certain products while crippling those of competitors.

However, outside of their cooperation in Open Source projects, commercial developers remain free to aggressively compete for market share with proprietary applications that run in the cooperatively developed open infrastructure. And since the success of their commercial products are dependent on the success of the underlying "free" infrastructure, they share a vested interest in making the Open Source Linux operating system a world class product.

Open Source isn't without its faults. The same creative anarchy that makes Open Source so dynamically adaptive over the long term, also makes it possible for misconceptions to lead some portion of the unruly mob astray over the short term.

Documentation is a particular problem. Programmers tend to prefer writing code to explaining what their code does. When they do manage to scratch out a few paragraphs, they tend to write from the perspective of someone who already understands the internal structure of the program.

This expectation of expertise can create a frustrating conundrum for the neophyte - an excess of arcane details, but barely a hint as to how to accomplish basic functions. Venturing into a new area can make even a grizzled veteran feel like a traveler overloaded with brochures extolling in exquisite detail the attractions of distant destinations, but unable to find a simple map showing how to get to these wondrous places.

The rapid rate of development in many Open Source projects further complicates the difficulties of keeping the documentation up to date with the latest changes in the code.

These shortfalls have created a range of market niches for companies that assemble and test collections of compatible Open Source products, bundle them with professionally printed manuals, and resell their added value packages as "distributions". There is also a growing industry offering fee based tech support for "free" Open Source products.

It's too early to predict for certain what the future holds for Open Source - or for the software industry itself. The Linux phenomenon does appear to prove that the same voluntary cooperation by self-organizing groups of self-interested individuals that has long been the driving engine of our modern industrial civilization, is also capable of extraordinary accomplishments in the digital age.

The critical question facing Open Source is whether it can integrate well enough with a free enterprise capitalist economy, to be more than just another unsustainable utopian denial of economic reality and human nature. The business of America is still business, and the much maligned profit motive remains the first principle for survival in the computer industry. Open Source will only continue to thrive as long as it remains possible to at least indirectly make money with "free" software.