> There was a brief article today on osonline stating that IBM was giving up
> its unix OS and switching to Linux. That has interesting implications. The
> Open Source movement is the most successful communal effort ever at building
> something of value. Now a large capitalist power wants to stake its future
> on that movement. IBM is giving up AIX, something they've invested billions
> in over the years, and instead will try to be good members of the open
> source community. What will capitalism think of next?
I'm not sure how one judges the value of communal efforts, such that open-source software is most successful, but anyway....
This is hardly surprising. IBM has a good history of supporting, and using, open source software. IBM embraced Apache earlier. IBM is also known for supporting open-source projects of employees. Wietse Venema works for IBM at an upstate NY research center and a recent notable software project he is engaged in with Dan Farmer is The Coroner's Toolkit, some network forensices software that is publically licensed (IBM has a variation of GPL and BSD style public licenses - http://www.fish.com/tct/LICENSE).
Realise though that open-source software as a paradigm is othogonal to economics in general. Open-source software philosophy is reactionary, actually, harkening back to pre-Micro$oft days. M$ is the company that invented the idea as software as intellectual property (to the degree that an entire business model could be based upon it). The open-source software movement is a rejection of that notion, but it never was a complete rejection of capitalism. See Stallman's site at http://www.gnu.org - 'free software' is closer to 'free speech' than it is 'free beer', and 'free software' does not mean 'non-commercial'.
What open-source software, and particularly GPL'ed software, means is that the software is freely reproduced, distributed, and modified - it is not someone's IP (in the legal sense). Users of the software (like me), find that software of that variety tends to be better supported, more robust, more secure, and more interoperable than its closed-source, IP competitors. But it is not incompatible with capitalism, and use of that kind of software with a capitalist enterprise is not a new thing, and is hardly shocking. Does the company run BIND for DNS? Do they use perl on their UNIX systems? Do they do UNIX printing? Only completely M$ shops might claim they hand't been using open-source software. Most management-types and laypeople think that open source == linux, and that just isn't the case. My company told me when I started that the policy was "no open source software", and I asked them if they really meant that, because they were using LOTS of open-source software (BIND and perl). What they meant was "no open-source operating systems for mission critical apps" (a policy which is no longer in place, I might add). The point is that media hype makes linux use in the enterprise a notable event - at the same time that the company is using BIND for DNS and the ISC's DHCP server for dynaimc address allocation. The latter two are open-source software - just not as sexy article topics as "IBM adapts linux".
The capitalists are not exploiting the work of open-source programmers (to a degree more than they are by being capitalists). Hardly. A lot of open-source software is the fruits of labour of companies' employees whose business model does NOT involve IP of software. I work for a 'brick and mortar', and my group has contributed two fairly popular (in their niche) pieces of open-source software. The software was written for an internal project and was released to the community for the benefits of others. They were GPL'ed to protect our programmer (so that someone couldn't take his work and make it into their own IP, which might have made our managers upset).
I tend to think of open-source software (in today's movement, i.e. post-Micro$oft) as the IT business world's version of academia and scientific collaboration. I build IT security solutions for my company, but the way I do my job (in terms of research, collaboration, documentation) is more like my friend who is a grad-student molecular biologist than someone who is a codewriter for Micro$oft, and most other people at my company. My company understands that 30% (hand-waving number) of my time is spent just perusing mailling lists and websites, not just working on my projects, but spending some time contributing to those virtual communities. We can criticise exploitation in the workplace in all sorts of areas, but I see little in the relationship with open-source software. The growth of open-source is directly related to the commercial expansion of IT due to the internet popularity. If companies related to all workers in a context like how companies are relating to IT workers and open source software, I would consider it progress.
Matt
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