Open-Source- Friend or Foe?

Imagine in twenty years time when a young child asks their parents (if parents still exist) what the world was like when they were a kid. With the exponential growth of technology it would be safe to say that a lot would have changed. The increase in access to information due to the Internet has cultivated communities of produser who are constantly consuming, manipulating and interacting with different medium to create evolving breeds of content. Open-source is one of the birth children that these online communities have created and as the name suggests it gives users access to the source code of applications which in turn grants the freedom to manipulate, improve and contribute to the application. This advance in software creation has come up against great opposition by many of the high profile software corporations whose market position has been threaten by the open-source culture. The question must then come down to the user; should we embrace this new model of software creation and the community that supports it or should we oppose it and remain subjective to large software entities?

So why should users support and use open-source software? Put simply the answer is customisation and contribution. Each individual user requires software that they use to satisfy a specific purpose in relation to their needs. Commercially produced software, although efforts have been made, does not give the user complete control over the functionality of the software. An example of this is Sugar CRM versus Microsoft’s Outlook CRM. Sugar CRM is an open-source Customer Relations Management application that allows the user to customise every aspect their operations regarding sales, marketing and communication. Unlike the Microsoft CRM that is restricted to functioning with Microsoft Outlook, Sugar CRM allows the user to customise the entire interface and functionality to suit the user’s specific needs. The great thing about the produser community is that once a user has modified the source code they make this information available to other users.

Naturally the open-source community has come up against great opposition by large corporate software entities like Microsoft. This is understandable considering Microsoft’s multi billion dollar enterprise would be put at risk if open-source became readily available and utilised for personal, corporate and government use. Microsoft has been actively lobbing against laws that will encourage the use of open-source software in the public sector in Europe. There have also been recent cases of open source developers coming under fire with software patient law suits being files against them. One individual that action was taken against was Bob Jacobsen, who was the developer of JMRI model-railroad control software. Michael A. Katzer and his company KAM claim that Bob, without permission, distributed their software and have demanded he pay for each copy that he issued for free.

I personally feel that the open-source community is not only providing valuable software but is challenging the basis of software creation and use. This produser model is vital in transferring the power from the supplier of software to the users which is only made possible by open-source’s high-performance collaboration and community building model.