Re: closed source : dark ages :: open source : enlightenment

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On Sun, 27 Nov 2005 17:51:06 -0500, Gerald Oskoboiny  
<[email protected]> wrote:

> while reading
>
>     Royal Society: rent-seeking is more important than science
>     http://www.boingboing.net/2005/11/25/royal_society_rentse.html
[...]
>> Once alchemists began to share their research
>> outcomes, they became true scientists, and the hundred years
>> that followed made more progress than the half-millennium that
>> preceded it.

I think it would be worth looking a little deeper. The last few decades  
have seen a distinct increase in the use of commercial-in-confidence  
protection of research results in medicine, and yet more has been achieved  
than in the half-millenium before...

Oh wait. First, there is the bit about standing on the shoulders of  
giants...

More to the point, there is a crucial question about funding. In a world  
where science is largely funded by public money, it seems inexcusable to  
hide the results from the public, but there is a limit to the amount of  
public money available. When private individuals or companies profit from  
the work, what is the appropriate way to ensure that they return something  
and so make the model sustainable?

There is a similar issue with Open Source development. Although there are,  
of course, shining examples, there are also many cases where there is  
massive duplication of initial effort, no real product being developed,  
and no apparent model to ensure that it happens. Mozilla and Linux have  
both benefitted from huge amounts of money being poured in by corporate  
giants promoting them as rivals to MS. Minimo and WebKit's mobile browser  
are both getting significant corporate funding, yet still come nowhere  
near Opera for size, speed or functionality.

In the accessibility world I have seen serious problems getting decent  
tool development, because people take open-source stuff that is very basic  
and think they can just use it without investing. Which means the  
commercial alternatives are generally very poor quality since they don't  
have to do any more. Meanwhile many good developers who do understand how  
to make proper tools are driven out of the market for lack of sales  
ability, and spendd their time doing something completely different. As a  
result, web accessibility tools are, almost a decade after the first ones  
became publicly available, pretty woeful, and the accessibility of the Web  
is also in a pretty sorry state.

I don't think Opera has anything against Open Source in principle - we do  
release assorted things as open source, such as extensions to Opera (which  
we design to be compatible with Firefox too) - but our development model  
is based on paying smart developers, and we do that by selling a product,  
not just the service of installing it. Nokia, Apple, IBM, Sun are all  
selling products that are more interesting if they have a browser, so for  
themm the investment in Open Source is an attempt to get something cheaper  
and better than what's available. Google sells information, and they get  
the information by being built into more and more products people use, so  
it makes sense for them to support Firefox and Opera too.

Opera just makes a browser. (well, really a suite, like Mozilla) Currently  
the competitors in the market that pays for the development are all  
closed-source. (WebKit's browser effort is interesting, but it is not  
*yet* at the level of competing - nor is MiniMo). I don't actually plan  
the future of the company, but it is interesting to speculate about  
different possible futures and the business models that go with them...

cheers

Chaals

--
Charles McCathieNevile                     [email protected]
  hablo español  -  je parle français  -  jeg lærer norsk
     Peek into the kitchen: http://snapshot.opera.com/























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