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18th May 10
Jonathan Cavell
There’s a question I’ve been wrestling with a lot over the last few years, can a ground swell of talented, motivated individuals without the profit motive seeking to do what is right take on the behemoth corporations. It’s a battle that’s been fought a number of times and will continue to be fought as long as individuals have good ideas that conflict with would-be profiteers (forever). Off the top of my head, I can think of several such battles:
- Wikipedia against Encarta
- Linux against Microsoft
- FireFox against Microsoft
- Blogs against Newspapers
For the most part, we’re talking about opensource vs. proprietary software, however I would not call that the only aspect. The question of who will win is not as easy as you’d think. Both sides have their advantages and disadvantages. Opensourcers are generally agile and broadly sourced. Much of the time they actually have more developer hours available then the big guys. Unfortunately, they don’t have the loyalty of a company paying for a man’s bread. The big guys have centralized management, available equipment and existing user-bases to piggy-back on. They also have short-sighted stockholders; stockholders who force them to stick with bad ideas as long as they’re profitable and prevent them from exercising necessary (and even popular) innovations that can’t be profitable.
The reason for the post is the new movement of Diaspora, to try to create an open version of Facebook’s OpenGraph. I think it is one of the most pure fights ever in this space. The big corporation (Facebook) has GIGANTIC potential profits on its side, but also must sacrifice many individual privacy rights to accomplish it. The opensourcers have wide public appeal (raising $110,000 from small donors) and a real case against that the giant is evil. It’s something that we could all agree would be “better” being a public service then a private service. So grab some popcorn and let’s see what happens.
