On The Road with Vicky Lamburn

I won’t go into this one in a big way as I’m still taking it in. That said, as much as I openly put my foot down to outright Microsoft bashing (and there is a lot of it) they also manage to come up with just as much baloney sometimes.

Recently Stephen Shankland over at CNET News enquired with a certain Clint Patterson to what extent it embraced competition from say Thunderbird (an email client) and also to assisting the developers with Exchange server support.

The open-source development model has yet to demonstrate the ability to support profitable software businesses that can drive the coordinated research and testing necessary to sustain innovation…

On the face of it that’s a fairly sensible comment if you purely look at things from the perspective that research and innovation can only occur with financial inputs. Notice also the clever drop in of ‘coordinated’ in that sentence to suggest that open-source projects lack co-ordination. In some sense that has certainly been true, but it’s now not quite the case as the Ubuntu project shows that the effectiveness of open source collaboration and coordination is no longer the disaster zone it once was.

Ok so on what grounds am I arguing against Mr. Patterson? I think it’s related to what I wrote last night; that there are many other forces behind the innovation on the web front nowadays, more than anything: passion. And maybe ‘profit’ looking at it from the word’s etymology is not just about a financial profit, but a profit of goodwill, support, emerging community, openness, user directed control.

And is support purely a carrot dangling on the end of the string? Or rather ponying up the dough (money up front) to get people to work on such things. No. What open source does very well is foster innovation by people who have a genuine passion to hack away into the night as it were, and do it just for the love of it. Apart from a ego massage, what other incentive do open source developers have? It has to be their passion for creating the wonderful software that they do.

If anything web development is partially open source because whilst it’s an unspoken truth to say that our designs may sometimes pass a resemblance to something we saw elsewhere and liked a lot–that is what happens. That’s design and art forms. Having influences that guide us to the next stage. Coders may peek into the source to look at various techniques and whilst Ctrl + C is not the solution so to speak (that’s copy, not break!) but we are influenced by the implementation. Even reading people’s websites, blogs and forum comments on how to solve a bloody Internet Explorer 6 layout issue is an open form of collaboration; we aren’t downloading proprietary binary objects to solve the problem; we are sharing the solutions and ideas in geek readable form!

Is this not in effect an open source model? Whilst I’m not saying we should now go and create a direct copy of say Flickr, some users may already be thinking, I wish it did this and that, and they’ll probably go and do it and be influenced by Flickr but they won’t necessarily leech the code; various parts of the process (design, code prototyping, implementation etc.) will be influenced by what has gone before. It’s an art form, and the creative person will have their influences and then chuck it in a pot, mix it up and have something that’s their own. It’s like my writing: my big influences include Jack Kerouac, JG Ballard and Will Self; but I’m not writing books exactly how Kerouac would. I’m not copying his words. They’re at the back of my mind when I write, as are the influences I get from everywhere. Web design is the same, be it code or visual–it has influences that whether it’s for a public, private or open entity–the same work practice has gone into it.

Can you honestly say that you have written a piece of code that hasn’t had even a minor influence in implementation or reason of coding it in the first place? (e.g. x didn’t work so I decided to start on this: y; to the solve the problem.) Can you say you sat in a dark room for a year and then designed a website (appearance) that had no influences at all but only your own concoction? Probably not. In fact as a writer I like identifying the prose that has influences from my favourite authors: like I say might call a certain sentence very Kerouac inspired (‘Go cry…’) or perhaps Will Self (I was impressed with the writing on the A41(M) and the mention of Lutyens… yes I know this shit man! It made it OK to write about Owen Williams’ bridges of the future–that’s the original 1959 bridges on the M1, OK?…) etc.

Maybe the web developer should be able to say, my design is influenced by the aesthetic of Flickr, the usability of Google based applications (which always have an aesthetic of their own)–and so forth.

So to wrap up, where does this leave Mr. Patterson’s statement? The point is that profit isn’t just about financial gains, there are profits from open source that we can all benefit from. Profits such as fostering the ability to contribute, be in control and do something yourself in the vein of your influences to communicate what you want to. Innovation sometimes seems to be seen as copying features from Windows, or Mac OS X and any other direction within that and some of it will. Apple did with what they saw at Xerox and Microsoft inevitably did with what they saw from Apple. But it’s putting your own spin on it. Can Flickr be called a bootleg or copy of what Yahoo! Photos was? No, it does the same thing but with its own spin on it. Operating systems do the same. Innovation will always sprout so long as someone has the ability to think, the ability to do it, the will to communicate and the passion to drive them there–regardless of the financial incentive to do so.

For this reason, I believe Mr. Patterson’s statement on the front of it is reasonable if a slightly dated view, and a very close minded view of what is needed to drive innovation. After all, I don’t remember there being any financial incentive when fire was ‘invented’?

Think outside of the box there are many other reasons aside from money. I’m not saying open source will beat Microsoft one day, maybe it will, maybe it won’t? Does it matter? The point is that the success of the web over the past ten years proves that open collaborative environments can foster innovation and do so incredibly successfully without precluding the financial gains that may come from it, but neither is it a prerequisite in my view. I.e. I could create something fantastic website and advertise and promote it for free (bar my ADSL monthly fee) and it might just gain traction. After all, it’s not exactly big well known brands and corporations behind some of the Web ‘2.0′ successes; though eventually they do become them themselves.

The web has levelled the playing field of opportunity. Maybe Open Source will do the same for the computer’s local environment; and maybe with the playing field levelled, that is what Microsoft is having a harder time of getting their heads around and how to leverage it for their business model.