Open Source is Not Innovative
Quick -- name an open source product that's innovative. If you said "Linux," you failed the test. Linux -- the darling of counter-culture programmers, for its "free software" advocacy and for providing an alternative to Microsoft Windows -- is not an innovation. It's essentially a copy of another operating system, called Unix, that has been around since the 1970s. Making a copy of existing product? No one that I know would call that "innovation."
And Linux isn't unique -- the open source model almost never generates breakthrough innovation. When Krzysztof Klincewicz, a management professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, analyzed the 500 top open source projects on SourceForge.net, he found that only 5 of the 500 -- one percent -- were examples of radical innovation.
Open source advocates get defensive when I point this out. Isn't Linux the most reliable operating system? Isn't it the only hope for those who can't stand Microsoft? Doesn't it represent the wave of the future, software development by crowdsourcing? I'm not saying that Linux is bad; just that it's not an innovation. I use open source products all the time -- the Wikipedia encyclopedia and the Firefox browser, for example. But encyclopedias have been around since Diderot, and Firefox is not radically different from any other browser.
In spite of these problems, I'm excited by open source because it points us in a new direction for tapping into the power of collaboration.
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