Shai Agassi of SAP: ‘If SAP’s software did go open source, Agassi claimed that the company would no longer have an incentive to innovate. “Intellectual property [IP] socialism is the worst that can happen to any IP-based society,” he said. “And we are an IP-based society. If there is no way to protect IP, there is no reason to invest in IP.”’
John Roberts of SugarCRM : “Open source puts the emphasis on engineering, not sales and marketing. That benefits the customer far more than a focus on sales and marketing…...I’m not sure the proprietary way is the right way any more. I’m not sure it’s good for the customer and certainly don’t think it’s the best in terms of innovation”
So the themes are innovation and IP protection.
When I hear people talk about innovation (whether something is or isn’t, encourages or discourages, etc, etc) I think innovation of what and for whom. For example Shai Agasi implies that Linux isn’t innovative because it’s ‘just’ a clone of Unix. I don’t necessarily agree, but forget that, what if the innovation of Linux isn’t features, but the development process? Doc Searls had a similar realisation. A study by Stanford has shown that the Linux kernel has less than 1% of the bugs that would be expected for a proprietary software of the same size. Isn’t that an innovation?
The other axis of innovation I think about is ‘for whom’. How many small businesses (and by that I mean less than 10 employees) are running SAP, Oracle, etc? That’s right, exactly none. So you can argue that Linux, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SugarCRM, Joomla, etc (and there are a lot of others in that etc) aren’t innovative because they are ‘just’ a copy of some ‘enterprise’ thing (and you’d be wrong) but suddenly the majority of the economy (i.e. small business, if you’re not paying attention) has access to all of this fantastic technology at prices they can afford. Isn’t that innovation?
Our other theme is ‘IP Protection’. To get to grips with this we have to break down the two parts; IP and Protection.
Wikipedia ”...intellectual property or IP refers to a legal entitlement which sometimes attaches to the expressed form of an idea…” In other words IP == Idea.
In this context ‘Protection’ means building a fence around our ideas and charging everytime someone wants to use them – in other words equating ideas to scarce physical objects that only one person can posses at a time. Problem is that ideas aren’t scarce – the world is overflowing with creative people with hundreds of ideas every day – and ideas, unlike physical objects, don’t necessarily get less useful the more they are shared.
If I have a gold bar and I share it with everyone I meet, it ends up being useless (and worthless) – I really do need protection for my gold bars because if I share the value always goes down (unless I get something in return) and if I keep the gold it stays valueable because gold is in short supply. If I share an idea with everyone I meet then the usefulness of the idea can go up or down – others can point out the flaws, fix flaws, or expand upon the idea. Fixing and expanding make my idea more useful (and therefore more potentially valueable). On the other hand locking up my idea only makes it less valuable over time – same amount of usefulness, just less value because eventually in a world awash with ideas someone will eventually think of something more useful.
So if protecting IP like it’s gold bars isn’t such a great idea how do we compete in an ‘IP-based society’? It’s important to remember that ideas are plentiful and to be seen as a IP leader, you need to keep associating yourself as the source useful ideas. If you want a metaphor the clue is in the word leader: How do you win a marathon? Simple. Keep Running.
If you want to be the leader in IP keep thinking of new useful ideas and improve and build on the ideas you already have. And what’s the best way to improve and build on ideas – share them. Share them as widely as possible and ask for feed back. This isn’t some startling new realisation I’ve just arrived at – it’s the basis for all scientific development since the enlightenment (as r0ml pointed out at EuroOSCON). Those darn scientists have been ‘IP Socialists’ sharing, improving, and building on each others ideas for hundreds of years, and look where that’s got us.
There is a great teaching in Zen in the Martial Arts (I paraphrase because I don’t have the book to hand) : “Don’t be concerned with how to make your opponent’s line shorter, it’s all about how you make your line longer.”
(# :: posted Nov 11, 12:24 pm in Open Source :: )
— Elliot Smith Nov 14, 08:37 pm #