There’s a dominant dogma in the online culture of the moment that collectives make the best stuff, but it hasn’t proven to be true. The most sophisticated, influential and lucrative examples of computer code—like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or Adobe’s Flash— always turn out to be the results of proprietary development. Indeed, the adored iPhone came out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth. – World Wide Mush by Jaron Lanier
Of course, all of Apple’s OS X-ish devices are already based on free UNIX distributions. The licenses of the open software requires Apple in some cases to provide the source code for the binaries they ship, and Apple complies. That doesn’t make the above claim false, exactly. I think it shows that the technology industry is a complex one. There are lots of relatively old and well understood problems that have open solutions, like compilers. Can closed solutions outperform GCC, for example? Sure. But a free, good enough, solution allows everyone else to spend their money and time on other problems. Maybe XCode wouldn’t be as delightful if Apple’s money and man power had been directed to reinventing GCC?
It’s easy to only point to the best example of closed development (but why would anyone point to Adobe Flash?), but these days there are lots of unsexy things that open source really excels at. A huge portion of internet infrastructure is open source, and this very blog is made of entirely open software. Blogging is a great example of a well understood problem that has several commodity solutions. There was a time, not so long ago, when it seemed like an open source web browser was too much to ask for, but obviously Mozilla eventually provided one for us. Then we got WebKit (really, KHTML, etc) and now we have Chromium. Whatever an iPhone is, exactly, is not well understood. Android is slowly figuring out how to solve the “small form mobile computer with phone” problem, but right now Apple has it nailed. And they didn’t even need to invent their own compiler for it, either. And, slowly, open source and culture is working its way up. Commodification is a form of wealth creation, and a really profound one. This is really what “Information wants to be free” means. Information wants to be copied, and after you get enough copies, you suddenly have a commodity.
