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A general distinction between IPR and FOSS supporters is the qualification of views. Many IPR friends have limitations to how much we like IPRs- to the extent that they facillitate innovation. For instance, PFF fellows have argued for the protection of reverse engineering and relatively high patent policy standards. There are boundaries to how much IPR supporters tout IPRs.
Conversely, FOSS supporters seldom qualify their liking of FOSS, and impose few limits or counter-balances to their valuations. Their bottom-line is that FOSS is some kind of revolution. For instance, here on IPcentral, there have been occasions where FOSS supporters likened it to churches and the life-sustaining aspects of the sun, in arguing that FOSS should not be liable for regulatory compliance or held to traditional notions of societal value (for the record, those who write for IPcentral do so in a drug free environment, commenters on the other hand…).
In the interest of informing readers further on the limitations of FOSS, I would like to call attention to Nick Carr's excellent article, The Ignorance of Crowds, at Strategy and Business (registration).
Carr makes the simple but often overlooked argument that FOSS development excels in incremental improvements on existing technologies, rather than pioneering and ground-breaking innovation. The open source model has proven to be an extraordinarily powerful way to refine programs that already exist — Linux, for instance, is an elaboration of the venerable Unix operating system, and the open source Firefox browser builds on Netscape’s old Navigator — but it has proven less successful at creating exciting new programs from scratch. That fact has led some to conclude that peer production is best viewed as a means for refining the old rather than inventing the new; that it’s an optimization model more than an invention model.
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The open source model is also unlikely to produce the original ideas that inspire and guide the greatest innovation efforts. That remains the realm of the individual. [edit: perhaps by individual Carr also means the integrated firm] Carr makes a careful choice of words in describing FOSS as an “optimization model more than an invention model.”
FOSS is primarily a development process model for innovating activity, and I would argue that the peer-production model itself is innovative, more so than technologies resulting from the model. The significance of distinguishing FOSS as an innovative process as opposed to a set of innovative technologies is that the notion that “FOSS is more innovative,” as suggested by some of its henchmen, is placed in proper context. FOSS fanatics confuse the journey (development) for the destination (product) when they argue that "FOSS is more innovative" to vent the superiority of their technologies.
Another drawback of typical FOSS arguments cited by Carr is that their touted strengths are also their weaknesses. Carr calls FOSS fanatics out... First, peer production… is not well suited to a job that requires a lot of coordination among the participants. If members of a large, informal group had to coordinate their efforts closely, their work would quickly bog down in complexity. The crowd’s size and diversity would turn from a strength to a weakness, and the speed advantage would be lost.
Second, because it requires so many “eyeballs,” open source works best when the labor is donated or partially subsidized. If Linus Torvalds had had to compensate all his “eyeballs,” he would have gone broke long ago.
Third… the open source model… is not as egalitarian or democratic as it is often made out to be... the crowd’s work has been filtered through a central authority who holds supreme power as a synthesizer and decision maker… Torvalds has gathered a hierarchy of talented... programmers around him to help manage the crowd and its contributions... the Linux bureaucracy forms a cathedral that coordinates the work of the bazaar and molds it into a unified product. The first drawback of FOSS may limit its viability in many technical spaces. In technology, as in most things, simplicity wins over complexity, or at least the inability to overcome complexity. The more FOSS entities refuse to admit its limitations, the less likely they will adapt to the innovation environment.
The second drawback cited by Carr may explain the FOSS movements’ aversion to regulatory policy. With relatively free inputs into technical development that off-set the relatively high margins of service oriented revenue streams, FOSS firms can ill-afford costs, such as patent due diligence, that do not add to their bottom line. Despite the financial success of some FOSS firms, its hardly flattering that many cannot withstand ordinary business costs that the rest of the industry bears.
The third drawback of FOSS cited by Carr may be the most important, and may explain why more FOSS firms may adopt formal capital-organizational infrastructure as development is more geared at producing commercial products. FOSS is not the pure form of peer-production that romance writers would write about.
This is an important contribution to the stabilizing of discourse on FOSS, where serious questions are posed that the revolutionary religious sects of FOSS would rather avoid. Carr also contains many citations of FOSS citizens Eric Raymond and Matt Asay (who I personally enjoy reading) to support his arguments, making the article even more worthy of review.
posted by Noel Le @ 6:42 AM | Free Culture Movement
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