Economist gets it Wrong

Dietrich Kappe, Wednesday, March 22, 2006 @ 9:35 am

I'm straying a little from the subject of Ajax, but this article from the latest issue of the Economist has me a little steamed. I've long been a fan of the Economist and its smarter-than-you-on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other-hand style. They often take contrary or unpopular views and give them a hearing. But when they get it wrong, they can really put their foot in it.

I've been working with the Internet for some time (1983) and had one of the first 100 web pages, and I've seen Open Source evolve over that time into something that threatens traditional business models. So I almost fell off my chair when I read this:

There are two doubts about its staying power. The first is how
innovative it can remain in the long run. Indeed, open source might
already have reached a self-limiting state, says Steven Weber, a
political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, and
author of “The Success of Open Source” (Harvard University Press,
2004). “Linux is good at doing what other things already have done, but
more cheaply—but can it do anything new? Wikipedia is an assembly of
already-known knowledge,” he says.

Innovative? Do they not remember the World Wide Web? That's Open Source at its roots, baby! NCSA httpd was the first web server and was distributed with a BSD style license. Lynx, Cello and all the various early browsers were all open source. Sure, NCSA's Mosaic started to cloud the waters a little bit (was it commercial, open source, etc.?) and then along came Netscape and IE, but the roots are Open Source. One of the reasons that Apache is more popular than IIS is that it's been around longer and is the direct descendant of NCSA httpd, not because it just replicates what IIS already did.

One can make similar arguments about various web technologies, P2P, and even Ajax, but that was a huge oversight.

For an excellent historical look at the Internet and WWW, see The Living Internet.

There are other issues with the article (hey, everyone knows that sourceforge is the open source ghetto, but have they heard of codehaus?), but they make some good points as to the management of successful open source projects. They don't, however, put commercial software under the same microscope. From experience I can tell you that the quality of most commercial software -- with the exception of the core products of companies like Oracle -- is design illiterate to borderline fraudulent. I've rarely seen commercial code that is even close to the quality of even middling open source. I guess embarrassment is a strong motivator.

Update 1:
Michael at coldfusion was a little put off by the same quote by Steven Weber. He sites some of the innovations in browser technology provided by Firefox. Still, does anyone remember the days prior to the commercialization of the Internet? You didn't buy WWW software, you compiled it from source. Open source, baby!!

Update 2:
Glyn Moody picks the same nit on innovation.

But let's leave GNU/Linux aside, and consider what open source has
achieved elsewhere. Well, how about the Web for a start, whose
protocols and underlying software have been developed in a classic open
source fashion? Or what about programs like BIND (which runs the
Internet's name system), or Sendmail, the most popular email server
software, or maybe Apache, which is used by two-thirds of the
Internet's public Web sites?

Not maybe on Apache, which traces it roots directly from CERN and NCSA web servers, both open source (yeah, yeah, BSD style).

agile ajax

Comments: 2 so far

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1. 

   Just came here through your comment on my post on the same topic!

   The Economist may maintain a ’smarter-than-thou’ tone in its articles. But from the way the magazine bungled this article, I have to wonder if they aren’t bungling the others (for example, in economics!) …

   And, thanks for all those informative links.

   Comment by Abi, Wednesday, April 5, 2006 @ 8:25 am

2. 

   Agree with you completely. If innovation is not there in open source then how can you explain so many projects in SourceForge! Maybe they should read Paul Graham’s essay once. They’ll fall off thier chairs for once.

   http://witopia.blogspot.com/2006/03/open-source-century.html

   Comment by Rajiv Poddar, Wednesday, April 5, 2006 @ 11:58 am

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