In a recent article in the Small Business Survival Guide, Raymond Keating states that the open source software development model will lead to economic stagnation.
The underlying question that open-source software brings to the fore is: do we want to go back to those dark days before intellectual property rights were clearly defined and protected? If one prefers robust entrepreneurship, invention, innovation, growth and job creation in the economy, then the only choice is to protect intellectual property rights. The open-source theory only opens society to stagnation
.There are better economic minds than mine that could refute his argument, so let me focus on my own case. As a very small business, I use Open Office as my desktop suite. It is free, stable and has features like "export as PDF", that the major vendor will not provide me. I can always purchase "Open Office for Dummies" should I need help, but haven’t required it yet. This zero cost option is money in the bank for me, and good for my business.
This website is built using an open source CMS. It is hosted by another local, small business. Open source gives me a powerful tool, at a low cost, that I could not afford otherwise. It also provides revenue to the hosting company. I am using open source applications for some of my client projects as well. These applications, like Mambo or Tikiwiki, allow me to implement pilot projects at about 25% of the cost of projects using proprietary enterprise software. My clients can test out new methodologies without software license fees; lowering the financial risk of innovation. Using open source software is a competitive advantage, and in some cases is the critical factor in getting a contract.
The bottom line – without open source software, it would be difficult to compete. Open source is very good for my small business.
Open Source is Highly Dependant on Strong IP Rights.Not only is Raymond Keating quite obviously a pin-head, but he in fact flatly wrong.
Open Source and Free software use licensing to protect the author’s wishes regarding the software they write. These licenses, of course, are highly dependant on strong Intellectual Property rights. This is why I can explictly use the legal system to force someone who steals GPL’d (or otherwise licensed work) to comply with the license.
As for economic concerns, most code, some say 90%, is never a for-sale product. So if people choose to co-operate on software they mutually need and no one can provide to spec (as in it actually works well), how is that bad for any economy? Right, it isn’t.