Open Source: No Secret Burdens
Written by admin on April 21, 2009
There must be something underneath the talk of Open Source software that is more concrete that just fashion, and there is. At the heart of the ICT industry and the Open Source movement is the matter of the cost of maintaining secrets.
About Secrets
It is common knowledge that organisations can grow strong based on closely-held secrets. Closely-held secrets are an information advantage for the secret holder. While everyone else walks in circles guessing, those that know can move forward. There’s no doubt that secrets are useful and strategic things.
It is also a matter of common knowledge that secrets leak out. Some secrets last longer than others, but no secret is perfectly indestructible. Copyright and patents lapse, information once critical becomes irrelevant. Secret holders can sometimes appear foolish keeping secrets that are relevant to no-one. Although secrets are useful, they also take up shelf space that sometimes is better purposed elsewhere.
In most well-established modern civilisations, the written media has made many secrets public knowledge through the fast and concrete medium of print. For example, the Law is no longer the secret thinking of rulers or potentates; it is written down, widely distributed and draws public comment. Similarly, accounting practices are no longer the secrets of a few port-side city state merchants; they are written down, widely distributed and also draw public comment. Such secrets are now non-secrets. It’s easy to benefit from the non-secret Law or non-secret Double Entry. Just read as little or as much about them as you want.
Exposure to the public view does not freeze the intellectual state of freed-up secret information either. The public corpus of the law evolves slowly through debate, critique, lobbying, fashion and plain hard work. Accounting practices are also regularly updated. The ICT industry is far younger than accounting or the law, and the idea of slow but constant evolution in public software is not yet accepted as a fundamental principle.
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