Thursday, November 4

Richard Epstein: Why open source is unsustainable ? And my answer

Richard Epstein (FT.com) writes Why open source is unsustainable. This is a law professors' article hence he digs things, things which if applied to proprietary stuff will also make it unsustainable.

To explain opensource you don't need a Lawyer you need a biologist. Opensource is governed by law of nature. Forget the sustainibility part , it would be very stupid to make this world slaves of few IBMs, Microsofts and Oracles. The natural course - was to create the competition for these, the software market decided to go opensource, it is not one man propoganda. Similarly when bunch of people were busy making high end bulky computers for fortunate fews, some people from Apple, Microsoft and Intel were thinking about Desktop and at those time this people were nobody.

So if open source is not sustainable there will be a market correction available for it also. And in Computing I dont think there is anything like sustainablity, there is only one word "innovation". The computing world has to stick with innovation and not sustainability, nothing can be planned and no holistic statements can be made in agreement/opposition of open source/ proprietary softwares. They both have their places.

Even if opensource becomes extinct in the future, it would have actually evolved in something else may be something more open, easy and more sharable. Or it may not but still the derivative or that 'something new' would still be a by product or a derivative of opensource. The commercial computing world is hardly few decades old and to come to conclusion at this is very funny.

To my belief Richard Stallman , Linux Torvalds, Eric Raymond, Steve jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and many more are not the end of the computing scene they are just the initial torch bearers and there much more to computing than proprietary / opensource. By taking the sides of any one is projecting a one-eye vision. Google is not even a decade old and has snatched the search engine market from the hands of Microsoft and Yahoo.
May be something like this can also happen in software programming, but how can we neglect or understate the importance of sharing the immense knowledge created by the opensource softwares and the markets created by proprietary softwares.

Can't they co-exist and grow simultaneously. The timeline on which we are sitting is not governed by governments, rocket scientists, stock exchanges and billiondollar entrepreneurs. There will be no other Bill Gates in the future and there will be Linux Torvalds in the future ? History is in the making and we have just flipped the cover.

Wait and Watch. No holistic comments please.