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Cnet reports that members of the Linux Foundation congregated at Google headquarters to discuss the future of their movement. As the innovative aspect of FOSS has shown itself pertaining to the FOSS development cycle rather than FOSS technologies or business models, I hope this was a reflective time for firms involved with the Linux Foundation. A major part of the meeting should give the FOSS movement a dose of reality: Leading names of Linux, the world's biggest grassroots software phenomenon, are spending three days debating whether an increasingly commercial open-source community should fight or ignore the world's largest software maker.
The Linux Foundation boasts 70 corporate… backers, including Intel, Oracle, IBM, Cisco, Motorola, Nokia, NTT, Dell, Red Hat and Sun, along with major customers like ADP, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. For years, the FOSS movement has painted itself as some kind of revolution and shunned its commercial aspects, in part to deter attention from the slow development of FOSS business models-technologies and to provide FOSS firms with an excuse to neglect regulatory compliance such as patent law.
As the FOSS movement admittedly turns more corporate, it should be held to standards which valuate all other commercial entities: marketplace competitiveness, value to consumers, ability to overcome immediate challenges, ability to operate under ordinary business costs. These issues are difficult for the FOSS movement, primarily because they force the movement to look in the mirror rather than blame Microsoft or the patent system for its competitive state.
The involvement of corporate powers in the FOSS movement dispels the notion that peer-production, a central aspect of the FOSS development model, will displace, or even remotely challenge traditional commercial firms. The more FOSS matures, the more it will adopt formal capital and organizational infrastructure, and resemble those corporations its proponents often criticize.
At the end of the day, FOSS is either the lamest and non-significant of revolutions, or simply a development and business model that has taken much time to mature and gain widespread acceptance. In being evasive on its commercial ambitions, the only thing that has kept FOSS back is itself.
posted by Noel Le @ 10:26 AM | Free Culture Movement
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