Eloquent Defense of Open Source Software

Open-source software is the future - it will commodify computer software. Commodification, in economics, occurs in an industry, when a product becomes generic and completely replaceable. This only occurs in industry where there are enormous competitive market pressures. For instance, it doesn't matter what brand of batteries you buy, they will all work in your sony mp3 player (they're sooo popular). Other things, like aircraft bodies, are not commodifiable. You cannot easily exchange a Boeing 747 body for an Airbus body.

I am stretching the point here, but essentially, some open-source software may commodify certain software markets. When I say open-source software, I mean software that is licensed in such a way that the seller of software is legally obliged to also provide the source-code and the right to change and use the source code for whatever purposes. Certain open-source software might one day achieve parity with or exceed commerical products in terms quality and hence, blow the bottom right out of the market. It may have already happened with Firefox, and OpenOffice.org is on its way.

Is open-source a good thing? Recently, the Peruvian Government contemplated legislation for mandating open-source software in the Peruvian Government. This scared the bejesus out of Microsoft Peru as can be seen in this letter from Microsoft General Manager Señor Juan Alberto González. Microsoft, as you can see, only sees it from a profit point of view. But even more weirdly, Microsoft considers open-source software dangerous, "from the point of view of security, guarantee, and possible violation of the intellectual property rights of third parties." This is a particular interesting conflation of ideas - security is elided into intellectual property rights of third parties.

But open-source is much more than monetary saving. It guarantees transparency. This is a social good. But I am explaining it poorly. Perhaps there is no one better to explain this than Peruvian Congressmen Edgar Villanueva Nuñez, who wrote this eloquent defense of the Peruvian software bill. As Nuñez points out, what is valuable about open-source is that it ensures "free access to public information by the citizen, permanence of public data, security of the state and citizens [from intefering foreign software companies such as, oh, you-know-who]".

The bill, incidentally, was passed.