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Oggetto: [Ip-health] Economist Editorial: Open source: Beyond capitalism? Da: James Love <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Data: Fri, 11 Jun 2004 06:06:36 -0400 A: IP-Health <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Open source: Beyond capitalism? Jun 10th 2004 From The Economist print edition
The open-source model can be applied to goods other than software, but it has its limits
THAT “open source” is a good way to make software is beyond question. For those unfamiliar with the term, the open-source model allows many people to collaborate on the development of a piece of software by making its underlying programming instructions, or source code, open to everyone, usually by publishing them on the internet. The resulting program is then given away too: open-source software is shared, not sold. Commercial software vendors, by contrast, jealously guard their source code because only by keeping it secret can they protect their ability to demand money for their products. Alamy
By far the best-known example of open-source software is Linux, an operating system that is maintained by volunteers around the world, runs on everything from wristwatches to mainframes and now powers one in five of the world's server computers. Open source's other successes include Apache, a piece of software that powers two-thirds of the world's web servers, Sendmail, a program that dispatches most of the world's e-mail, and MySQL, a database program.
Advocates of open source argue that it produces software that is secure, reliable and, of course, cheap. All this is clearly true, despite the fact that open source's opponents—chief among them Microsoft, the world's largest software company—try to deny it. Now many people want to apply the open-source model in many fields other than software. There is already an open-source cola recipe, an open-source encyclopedia and open-source academic journals. The model is also being applied in medical research (see article). Some zealots even argue that the open-source approach represents a new, post-capitalist model of production. Are there no limits to the power of open source?
Of course there are. The model is particularly well suited to information-rich goods, of which software is merely the most obvious example, since it is pure information. The surprisingly good open-source encyclopedia (see Wikipedia.org) is another example. Like software, it is modular, which allows different people to work on different bits. Drugs, too, are information-rich goods, and searching for candidate molecules and performing clinical trials may be amenable to open-source-style distributed collaboration. So far, so good. But building, say, an open-source car is rather more problematic, since information (in the form of design and specifications) constitutes only a minor ingredient: the costs of materials and manufacturing would remain. Until someone invents a “universal replicator” capable of synthesising any object from software specifications, it is hard to see how the open-source model can be applied to manufactured goods.
The model has other limitations as well. It is not clear, for example, that the open-source model can be genuinely innovative—most open-source software merely imitates existing commercial products. Furthermore, the open-source software movement is driven by the desire to dethrone the proprietary software model, embodied by Microsoft. This shared goal makes its members more willing to contribute their efforts to the common cause, which may not apply in other fields.
A force for good
Is open source really a new post-capitalist economic model? In fact, open source might be said to be parasitic upon capitalism. IBM, for example, pays an army of programmers to work on Linux, both for the greater good and as a competitive ploy against Microsoft. And many people who contribute to open-source projects do so with the approval of (and using the resources of) their employers, be they universities or firms. Ultimately the open-source approach may prove to be symbiotic with capitalism. Computing firms including Novell, Sun and Apple are adopting hybrid models in which they “open source” (yes, it is a verb) some bits of some of their products.
Even where the open-source model is not adopted, however, it can still have beneficial effects. The very existence of open-source alternatives often acts as a force for greater openness and transparency. Microsoft, despite its hatred of open-source, now allows certain large customers to inspect its source code, though not to share or modify it. A similar “open-sourcesque” concession was recently made by Reed Elsevier, a publisher of scientific journals. Stung by comparisons with the openness of internet-based journals, it will now allow academics to post papers that have been accepted for publication in its journals on their own websites too.
The open-source model will never replace capitalism or live up to the most Utopian claims of its most enthusiastic supporters. Nevertheless technology-enabled collaboration among large groups of people working without pay for a common aim, whether it is called “open source” or something else, can be a powerful force for good, and is to be welcomed.
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