![]() ![]() When they use the words “crowdsourcing”, “open source”, “cocreation”, or whatever it’s called this week, they are talking about ideas. I’m not putting them or their idea down, I’m just saying it’s not new, and it’s not really what it’s hyped up to be. And if a V8 diesel engine is “green”, I’ve got an Arctic ice fishing camp I want to sell you. If that’s automotive manufacturing, then that’s ok, but it’s not new. That kind of thing has been around for decades. They essentially help you assemble a kit car made from some custom parts and a whole lot of off-the-shelf parts. I say that in quotes because Local Motors, while a cool idea, is not a real “car manufacturer”. Lack of accountability would be massively irresponsible (and illegal) for a “car manufacturer”. ![]() The hype about Local Motors has made me think and read more about open source. It might be a corporate sponsor, or grass roots donations. Even the free software is sometimes built from an established funding source. But face it, the open source movement probably doesn’t have a lot of lawyers on staff, so backing up a license with real teeth may not be a primary goal for them. There are special rules associated with the GNU license usually associated with open source that offer some guidelines about making for-profit products starting from free code. The source code is freely available, so anyone with the inclination can download it and modify it, or build on to it or around it. When you (or I anyway) think about open source, I usually think about the word “free”, and about a lot of volunteer labor, but this is not always the case. A common argument against open source is that there is not always a clear line of accountability, in fact, much of the software bears little disclaimers such as “this will void your warrantee” and “we do not accept responsibility for anything this software does to your system…” and so on. Now I have to say that the quality of the software certainly varies. I’ve never paid a cent for apps or utilities or new Android derivatives for my phone, but I seem to have new stuff on it constantly. These are all open source stuff, and all free. There are so many versions of Android and little utilities that it kind of boggles the mind. I’m an avid Android tinkerer, and with all of the custom open source stuff that exists out there for every type of Android device, the possibilities are simply endless. So with the bigger open source organizations, there is often some kind of money behind the effort, helping to ensure quality, or helping to direct the overall volunteer effort. Mozilla does have a lot of volunteer help, but they also have some paid employees. A lot of open source stuff arrives through the graces of the Mozilla foundation, which was originally established by grants from AOL, of all companies, and as a non-profit, also accepts donations. Here’s an article from Business Week describing why you don’t see more commercial open source software. There are flavors of Linux which you can buy, sold by real companies, such as Red Hat, SuSE (maintained by Novell). Like Apple, there are other companies who have started from an open source root and created a commercial product with proprietary code. Even Mac OSX started out from FreeBSD, an open source derivative of Unix. It shows just how much time some people have on their hands. Open source also includes the Android smartphone operating system (based on Linux), MySQL (database), Apache (web server), and plenty of others. Just as a curiosity, h ere’s a timeline of various Linux distributions. Of the things I use, WordPress, PHP (web scripting), Thunderbird (Mozilla email), and Gimp (Photoshop clone) are all open source. We all know stuff like WordPress, Firefox and Linux, but there are way more, stuff that you run into every day. If you’re not sure what “open source” really means, have a look through this great Wikipedia entry on the subject, which seems to offer an objective point of view, with both the positive and negative aspects. There’s a lot of open source stuff available today. Funny how the left and right tend to converge if you go far enough to either extreme. I tend to see the typical open source crowd as the unlikely intersection between hippie “free love” types and the living-in-a-concrete-bunker-in-Montana libertarians. It’s a worthy topic, and increasingly relevant in our digital age, yet conspicuously absent from the CAD world. Still, I hesitate to write about open source, because the topic usually attracts a fair number of weirdos and religious fanatics. Thanksgiving is past, and everyone (in the US) is off of work, what a great opportunity to slip in something that doesn’t have to do with the same old same old. ![]()
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