Issue #43
Last Update December 24, 2005
National The Open Source Model by Gerry Krownstein There are many areas of our society in which current practices just aren't working. The shift from governmental and cooperative structures to free-market models and privatization has been successful in some arenas, but a dismal failure in others. Areas where this process has failed most egregiously have been health care, education, energy research, prison management and "nation building". Surprisingly, another model of economic organization has proven to be astoundingly effective in providing basic services and attacking monopolistic structures and practices. This is the Open Source movement.
Providing basic infrastructure has almost never been a profitable endeavor. Private capital created the affordable automobile, but this would have remained a toy without government road building. (Although a few private toll roads were built, the high cost and limited scope of these made almost no impact in creating America's mobile society.) The New York City transit system, the most efficient people mover in the world, was started with private capital; ensuing bankruptcies (and government construction of the Independent subway system during the depression) left the entire subway system and most of the bus lines to be operated as a government utility. Airlines were built with government subsidies, and, with deregulation, have fallen on hard times.
Basic infrastructure, therefore, has long been a government domain, with periodic attempts at privatization turning out to be costly failures. Recently, however, a new model of infrastructure creation and maintenance has appeared which is neither governmental nor private/for profit. This is the Open Source model, long known in academia (though under different names), and achieving prominence in computer software development.
In the Open Source software model, a group of unpaid volunteers develop or improve a software project of interest to them. In exchange for their labor, they get input into the scope of the project, ensure the quality of something important to them, win professional esteem within a community of peers, and achieve an in-depth understanding of a tool they will be using for fun or profit. The work is done by individuals, but it is the general public that reaps the benefits. Software developed this way is often free, and is open to the world for modification and improvement. Bugs are eliminated relatively quickly, because a large contingent of affected users is out there looking for the source of the error, and solutions are publicly posted for anyone to view, criticize and use. New or improved features are often contributed by people with a real need; sometimes a feature that would not be economically feasible for a commercial software company to introduce, because of limited demand, will be made available by a contributor who created it for his or her own use.The easy availability of program source and the complete lack of trade secrets fosters both quality and innovation. This kind of environment used to be the norm for academic scientific research, although commercial sponsorship and a desire by universities and individual professors to cash in on discoveries have made detrimental inroads on the modern research process.
Open, voluntary communitarian endeavor, a third way between private, proprietary control and governmental management, would make a good model for such diverse areas as drug research, artistic creation (open source techniques have been used in film-making and music composition), decentralized energy production, agricultural innovation, creation of affordable housing and many other areas where infrastructure is needed, secrecy is detrimental, and a pool of skilled workers exists to design and execute projects. Open source software has shown that people are motivated by many things besides money, and that these other motivations can be be the engine of progress.
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