Why Open Source?
August 3, 2011
ITworld’s interview provides some insight into the man behind Hadoop in “Doug Cutting talks about Hadoop, and Open Source.”
Writer Bob Reselman asked some questions on programming languages and coding that I’m not going to get into here (but do see the article if you’re interested in specifics.) More interesting to me are Cutting’s comments about his approach to open source:
“Open Source seemed to offer the option to have the software that I’d written, this particular one, Lucene, live on and have the opportunity for people to use it. Maybe somehow there would be some revenue for me, although frankly when I first got into it, that wasn’t at all an interest. I had no business aspirations around Lucene at all. I just wanted to see this software written and not go to waste.”
Cutting’s desire to share is inspiring, as is his interest in collaborating. We’d like to see such attitudes expand.
Given recent trends, though, we have to wonder whether the open source community is built to last. Our question: Will open source just morph into a commercial service? Or can it be saved from that fate by developers willing to contribute to the greater good?
Stephen E Arnold’s forthcoming Online Magazine column “Open Source Search: A Digital Technicolor Dream Coat” takes a look at how some vendors are using the phrase “open source” as a way to squeeze some marketing juice from the growing interest in FOSS, free and open source software. The Online Column was prompted by the complaint that Squiz’s use of “open source” on its splash page was not an indication that the company is in the open source software business. I wonder what Bill Clinton would define “open source” to mean? You can read about “supported open source” in “Squiz and Funnelback: Supported Open Source.”
Cynthia Murrell, August 3, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
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2 Responses to “Why Open Source?”
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You ask whether ‘open source will morph into a commercial service’ – actually I think a lot of code is open sourced to specifically prevent commercial interests from killing good ideas. As a developer working on closed source code, you can’t predict what will happen – your employer could be sold, go out of business or simply change direction, and the project you’ve poured your soul into may end up as a DVD sat on a shelf in a lawyer’s office somewhere, as an asset that’s effectively worthless. Open source can keep software alive no matter what happens in business.
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