Discussion on Open Source

It was almost midnight and we were still working hard. One of finEye's star engineers and I started talking about open source software. It was a fun discussion. He is very passionate about this phenomenon called open source software development. I like it too. Infact, it is awesome. A lot of what we have been able to accomplish at finEye has been possible because of the availability of free and stable open source software. We use the full open source stack - Linux, MySQL, eXist XML database, Tomcat, Eclipse, Struts.

We agreed on most of the benefits but where I disagreed (at least have my apprehensions) was the sustainability of the movement and the long term repercussions on innovation in the software industry. Let's talk about sustainability first. Open source movement has tremendous momentum now and has a villain in Microsoft. Once the villain goes away, so can the drive and passion. Why are these smart people not developing the next generation search engine to beat Google at its game. There is no reason why 5000 smart guys can't develop something that is better than Google and can give the ability to publish ads at 1/10th of what Google charges (and then use the money for further advancement of open source.) Well, Google is not the villain. It is Microsoft. And majority of geeks hate Microsoft with a passion. Now, lets talk about the repercussions on innovation. This is the point Bill Gates keeps talking about. Of course he has his motives but his point cannot be ignored. Open Source has not created one new thing. They have done only one innovation - free software. Who will create the next paradigm? Will some smart guy sitting in MIT be incentivized enough to come up with the next big thing or will he be skeptical that open source movement will duplicate/copy the concept?

Please don't get me wrong here. I love the open source movement. Some big boys were charging too much for unstable software. This has stopped now. I hear Sun is planning to make Solaris's code open to public and Microsoft is toying with the same idea for Windows. As a consumer I love it. But I really don't know how this will all impact the innovation in the software industry. Another one of those unknowns.