At the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco last week, I was struck by the frequency with which panelists and commenters would ask with respect to some development or proposition: “Is it good for open source?”

Not, is it good for programmers, or customers, or the IT industry, or software development, or the world at large, but “good for open source.”

This anthropomorphization of open source seems passing strange. Open source is an approach to producing software, a method by which creators can make their work freely available while ensuring that others reciprocate, and in the view of its practitioners, it is a superior way of producing software.

But open source is a tool, and characterizing it as a test of value makes no more sense than asking whether something is good for electric drills.

The counter-argument, I suppose, would be that “everybody knows” that open source is indeed good for all the other folks mentioned, so the question is merely a shorthand for “is it good?’ But that is not an assumption that I share, so it is not known by everybody. Open source may or may not be good, depending, and assuming its virtue so that one can truncate inquiry is error.