OpenSourcing a boon or bane

The whole world is stepping on the gas searching for every nook and corner that could possibly help in finding a vent for progress , one major contributor to this has been opensourcing . Be it technology, knowledge and flow of information , opensourcing does have a significant contribution . But the question really is , is it helpful or is it harmful . The rest of the blog shall give my 2 pence about opensourcing.

OpenSourcing is a concept which refers to improvization of any product by getting contributed from people who not only make it , but also use it. It was introduced in the software sector by NetScape in 1998 in an attempt to improvize the performance of the Navigator( The first web browser) and make it more secure. Typically in a software industry the code is shared along with the executable , and any user whosoever feels the need , can change it and send it back to the principal coders and they after reviewing the change would add the name of the user to the list of source coders. In return these source coders also get a share (this is not mandatory , some can really be free of cost and some rewards are trivial) of the earnings of the product. This we all know , but what are the real goods and bads about it?

The goods :- There is a philosophy that is beleived by people of the likes of Linus Torvalds(developer of Linux Kernel) and Richard Stallman(founder of GNU ),that knowledge belongs to the world and that whatever is absorbed from it should rightly go back to it and so outsourcing is regarded by these people as a tribute to whatever they could learn from the world . Thomas L Friedman in his book "The World is Flat" considers opensourcing as a major falttener of the world because the source is shared back and forth crossing boundaries and making the world a small place where a person sitting in India could contribute to the code written by some other person in North America. Did u know that Wikipedia is an opensourced free online encylcopedia and it is far more famous than the priced Brittanica's encyclopedia. GNU the mother of Linux is a free operating system and has a vast number of contributors making it the most robust operating system in the world ( Security wise experts say Linux is 8/10 while Windows is 4/10). GDB is the best debugger that is available today which is also opensource. The key attribute here is the quality of the product that is presented to the world. It is an unstated fact that the developer can not look at the various angles of a product which become the key during deployment . This major obstacle is blown off by OpenSourcing coz the deployers get to modify the code.

Another wonderful aspect about this is ,it contributes to global integrity. Let me give an example to get this idea more transparent. We enjoy company of our friends so much , frankly speaking the thrill that I got in working towards making one of our pal the prez at our college is uncomparable , atleast not with the feel that i get when i go out with our team for a lunch. Why ? Differences , no because two individuals are bound to have differences, we all did have differences , but we did love them and enjoy them as well. The key to this feeling is that , in the office we work on a profit motive , to earn money and make a living but there back in college, we did it for the love of ourselves, because we loved the company of each other and we did want to have an identity of a group that had the best time in our college. Similar is the feeling with these geeks , they do feel a spirit in being a part of the best product in the world ,and making it free adds to the reputation . They have a feeling , for all that mother earth has given us we are giving this wonderful peace in return.

he Wall Street Journal , composed and edited by the best brains is suffering a setback in the income because of blogging ? Blogs are getting more popular because they provide views of the common man and more because they add specifics to detail, and this is because a lot of people post their views on the same topic.

The bads:- As every coin has two faces so does OpenSourcing. This side has the support of people who have been extraordinarily successful in making money , people of the likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates , who strongly believe that a human is maximum motivated by the lowest part of the Malsow's heirarchy of needs triangle,physiological needs. The ideology is that man is best motivated by money , so if the activity of opensourcing happens for free ( as it does in most of the cases) the drive for those geeks who try to improvize the performance is lost. They beleive that research that is put in for developing a software ,costs millions of rupees and inorder to keep the wheel moving , a pure passion towards global integrity and self actualization would not suffice in funding research , only money would. They see the open sourcing industry as a threat to them that is unethical , because they clearly know if a common man gets to know that there is a pdf reader that is capable of all the functions of Adobe Acrobat Reader for free , who would want to buy the licensed version that costs quite some money?

Both the sides have equally valid points and it is really very tough to support one view. What if , the issue is a little more complicated ,what if the definition of opensource be changed from the monetary angle , what if it was reframed to be a software which is priced ,nothing else changed ? Well that would certainly counter the main criticism that OpenSource is currently facing but feasibility of this new proposition is yet another thing that ties the bird's wings down.