Proprietary vs. Free software is a boring moralistic debate that doesn't really go anywhere. The key issue is about sharing and propogation of interesting ideas. Free software permits this, and actively encourages it. Proprietary software inhibits this kind of exchange, but does not prevent it.
Cases to consider:
- The open software community pioneered the critical foundations of the internet: TCP/IP, bind, sendmail, apache, etc. Proprietary vendors needed to play catch-up to stay in the game (and adopted/reused open software to do so).
- Microsoft Office is touted as the canonical example that the open source community will forever play catchup to a proprietary vendor/standard. In this particular instance, open source follows the innovations of the proprietary software, yet Microsoft played catch-up with the open source community to beef up their own security model (with Kerberos).
- The realm of "software" is very large; it is just as easy to find cases where open source development innovates ahead of proprietary as it is to find cases that demonstrate the opposite.
When software is proprietary (like Microsoft Exchange), it's difficult to extend. Thus, the drive to first reimplement it (as with SuSE's
Openexchange) before it can become a platform for
new ideas to be expressed. Extending an open platform, on the other hand, allows developers to focus on implementing new, interesting ideas instead of re-implementing an existing platform just to experiment.
open source does innovate
TeeJay on 2002-10-28T11:39:00
I think open source is very well suited to innovation particularly where the barriers of entry are low.
For example there are many great features in Mozilla that leave Opera and Internet Explorer well behind, but it took the Mozilla developers a long time to build the foundations, now that the foundations are in place (and even those foundations are pretty radical in themselves) it is leading the way in browser and XUL innovation
Looking at Office and Productivity software there are other barriers
- The sheer size of productivity software means that building the foundations and basic software before adding new features take a long time
- The market barriers are large - several large commerical entities fighting over the little that MS Office monopoly leaves them so little funding or support is available.
- The lack of space to grow, the productivity software space is already bloated with unused features - people already have more than they need - there is no itch to scratch.
Claiming that Open Source doesn't innovate is rubbish - OSS and FS innovate a lot but many people don't notice because they don't happen to be looking where it is happening.
