A common criticism that I hear when discussing open source with people who
are not involved in the milieu is that open source does not innovate. The
canonical examples cited are of course OpenOffice ("They're just cloning
That Other Productivity Suite!") and the Gnome/KDE desktop environments
("Companies did and paid for the hard UI research work, open source just
takes that hard work and implements with no additional thought!"). In other
words, they see open source as a group of "(code) monkey see, (code) monkey
do" people, that will always be playing catch-up with closed source innovators.
A further comment is that when a particular piece of open source software
does present innovative features (I think the case in point was the Linux
kernel), it is usually due to a company pledging resources towards
implementing that feature for their own specific business needs, and not to
the mythical grassroots bazaar of hackers in their free time.
Do you think that open source communities on the whole innovates less than
the closed source counterparts? Do you have examples of instances where
open source communities were the source of particular innovations that then
propagated into the proprietary world? Can open source communities be
innovative at the "hacker in her free time" level, without the drive of
companies? And, while "innovation" in general is obviously important for a
company, should it have the same (or any) importance for open source projects?
Original issue reported on code.google.com by
david.jc...@gmail.comon 16 Mar 2008 at 4:31