Open Source And Patents: Everything You Need to Know

Open Source licenses and patents give software developers two very different ways to share their work. 

With an Open Source license, the original owner still retains distribution and sharing rights, but anybody can look at and modify a program's code and software. It's important that you understand the difference between patents, copyrights, and Open Source licenses to ensure your work is adequately protected.

What Is the Difference Between a Software Patent and Copyright?

Unlike the holder of an Open Source license, the owner of a patent has exclusive rights over the patented software. No one else can make, use, modify, or sell patented software, and the source code is not available to the public.

Patent rights give the holder control over who uses software and for what purpose. Though software developers can protect their work using both copyrights and patents, copyrights only protect the code itself. Patents, however, protect the program's functionality.

Patents are better than copyrights for software developers because they protect the program regardless of the code and language used. In comparison, copyrights aren't very practical for developers. If you want to release Open Source software while retaining some rights, a copyright only gives you power over someone who steals your work verbatim.

This is because a copyright doesn't protect the specific function of a software program. If a person finds a way to execute the same function using different code or a different language, the original creator of the software won't have any recourse with a copyright alone.

By securing copyrights and patents, software developers have some flexibility for their protections. For example, the software owner can grant users unlimited rights, some rights, or deny rights to use the software. Moreover, if a developer wants to release their work with an Open Source license, they can do so with a patent or copyright to retain some rights. This ensures that other users only access and modify the work under certain conditions.

Patents for software, however, do have their limits. Be mindful of the following before moving forward with a patent:

Patents protect the program's function but not the code.

The filer must define the process that the patent protects in the patent application.

Patents protect software only in terms of strict liability.

Also note that a copyright protects your code from being lifted by another user, but you don't have to officially register to enjoy these protections. However, people still file copyrights to enjoy other benefits, such as retaining official proof of ownership.

What Is an Open Source License?

Distributing software under an Open Source license allows anyone to view, use, and modify the code behind the computer software. Users may modify the source code without permission, but the developer can exclude them from publishing their changes or only permit additions under certain conditions.

An Open Source license may affect some patent protections, but a person can still apply for patent rights to safeguard their software. If you want to retain some patent protections while still sharing your work with others through an Open Source license, consider working with a patent attorney to confirm that you have the protections you need.

Most Open Source licenses also include a reciprocal patent agreement. This agreement outlines things like rights granted in perpetuity, whether recipients can redistribute the work, and the conditions that they must meet when they do distribute the work. It also ensures that the protections a license provides extend to the contributions that people make to a project.

What Is the Gnu Public License?

The Gnu Public License (GPL) is an Open Source license stipulating that any distributions of the licensed software are also protected.

The GPL provides a list of copyright protections to the original software developer. However, the license permits other users to copy and distribute the software and make and publish works based on the software. In turn, users must release their changes under the GPL and make the adjustments in their source code available to other users.

Many companies and popular software programs, such as the Linux operating system, use the GPL. This gives users access to a vast body of knowledge from other developers and incentivizes them to continue improving the software.

If you need help with Open Source licensing and patents, you can post your legal need on UpCounsel's marketplace. UpCounsel only accepts the top 5 percent of lawyers to its site. Lawyers on UpCounsel come from law schools such as Harvard Law and Yale Law and average 14 years of legal experience, including work with or on behalf of companies like Google, Menlo Ventures, and Airbnb.

#OSS (Open Source Software) jimat perbelanjaan kerajaan RM370j

Putrajaya: Kerajaan berjaya menjimatkan RM370 juta sejak lapan tahun lalu berikutan pelaksanaan Program Perisian Sumber Terbuka (OSS) bagi mengurangkan kos pembangunan teknologi komunikasi dan maklumat (ICT).

Ketua Pengarah Unit Pemodenan Tadbiran dan Perancangan Pengurusan Malaysia (MAMPU), Datuk Omar Kaseh, berkata OSS kini sudah dilaksanakan 921 agensi kerajaan atau mewakili 99.6 peratus daripada keseluruhan agensi awam di pelbagai peringkat sejak 2004.

“Ia digerakkan melalui pelancaran Pelan Induk OSS Sektor Awam dan penubuhan Pusat Kompetensi Sumber Terbuka (OSCC). Seramai 7,300 kakitangan awam dilatih OSCC dari peringkat asas hingga tertinggi.

“Selain itu, 96 kakitangan menerima pensijilan OSS dan 16 penyedia latihan yang sah dari universiti dilantik bagi memperluaskan latihan kepada pelajar serta kakitangan di universiti awam,” katanya dalam satu kenyataan, semalam.

Katanya, OSS penyumbang utama kepada bidang ICT negara melalui penyelidikan dan pembangunan (R&D), manakala 10 produk generik dibangunkan OSCC untuk diguna pakai 724 agensi secara percuma, antaranya MySpamGuard, MySuftGuard, MyNetWatch, MyWorkSpace, MyDesktopManager, MySurveillance, MyTaskManager, MyMesyuarat, MyBooking dan MyDocManager.

“Pembangunan produk ini bertujuan menangani pertindihan usaha, sekali gus menjimatkan kos pembangunan kerajaan dan meningkatkan kecekapan kakitangan ICT sektor awam dalam usaha memberi tumpuan kepada pembangunan aplikasi spesifik di agensi,” katanya.

Why Open Source Is the Key to Cloud Innovation

By Thor Olavsrud

In the 25 years since Richard Stallman wrote the GNU General Public License, free and open source software (FOSS) have become pervasive in computing: Linux, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL and more can be found in large numbers of enterprises across the globe. And open source is now increasingly undergirding cloud computing as well.

"Open source is certainly at the foundation in terms of building out cloud technologies," says Byran Che, senior director of product management at Red Hat and responsible for its cloud operations offerings, management software and Red Hat Enterprise MRG, (Red Hat's Messaging, Real-time and Grid platform). "If you take a look at market share in the server space, as you look at traditional data centers, about 70 percent are running on the Windows platform and about 30 percent are running Linux. As you take a look at what operating systems people are choosing to build applications on in the cloud, the ratio flips completely."

The reasoning is simple, Che says: With a fresh start, you get to build a whole new architecture from the ground up, and open source gives you the best value.

"You can't get to the Amazon scale or the Google scale and pay the license fees," he says.

Cost isn't the only thing giving the open source model an edge in the cloud space. Che also points to the capability to create a community around a project and thus drive rapid innovation.

"That's what open source is really good at," he says. "Amazon, Google, Facebook, all the people building out all these cloud applications, infrastructure and services, they're all doing it on open source. The fact that they're using open source software is the only way they can innovate at the pace they need to. They can't wait for their vendors to go through the development cycle."

Does SaaS Violate Free Software Principles

But what exactly is open source doing in the cloud? Stallman, for whom free software is intensely political (he disdains the term open source), claims that cloud computing—specifically Software as a Service (SaaS)—cannot be free by definition.

"SaaS and proprietary software lead to similar harmful results, but the causal mechanisms are different," Stallman wrote in an article published by the Boston Review in 2010. "With proprietary software, the cause is that you have and use a copy which is difficult or illegal to change. With SaaS, the cause is that you use a copy you don't have."

"Many free software supporters assume that the problem of SaaS will be solved by developing free software for servers," he adds. "For the server operator's sake, the programs on the server had better be free; if they are proprietary, their owners have power over the server. That's unfair to the operator, and doesn't help you at all. But if the programs on the server are free, that doesn't protect you as the server's user from the effects of SaaS. They give freedom to the operator, but not to you."

Stallman's contention has its roots in the philosophical divide between free software and open source software. The open source movement, Stallman says, is a development methodology with a practical focus on making the source code available. The free software movement, on the other hand, promotes an ethical stance on how users should be able to interact with their software.

For Stallman, free software must provide users with four essential freedoms:

1. The freedom to run the program as you wish


2. The freedom to study and change the source code so it does what you wish


3. The freedom to redistribute exact copies


4. The freedom to redistribute copies of your modified versions

While the open source definition and the free software definition are nearly identical, they seem to come apart at the seams when it comes to cloud.

"Releasing the server software source code does benefit the community: Suitably skilled users can set up similar servers, perhaps changing the software," Stallman wrote. "But none of these servers would give you control over computing you do on it, unless it's your server. The rest would all be SaaS. SaaS always subjects you to the power of the server operator, and the only remedy is, Don't use SaaS!. Don't use someone else's server to do your own computing on data provided by you."

Meanwhile, the open source world is working feverishly across the cloud stack—Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), SaaS, Data Storage as a Service (DaaS)—and in cloud management.

The Properties of Open Cloud

Che says Red Hat believes in the open cloud, which he says has seven defining properties:

1. It's open source. "That's the foundation upon which you build," Che says.


2. It's based on collaborative development. "There's got to be a viable, independent community around the project," he says. "That dynamic has to be there, otherwise it's just a proprietary company releasing its source code."


3. It's based on open standards and open formats that are not tied into proprietary technology.


4. It gives you the freedom to use your intellectual property.


5. It gives users a choice of infrastructure. They get to choose their infrastructure provider and cloud provider.


6. It has open APIs. "It's got to be pluggable and extensible," Che says. "It can't be restricted by what you got out of the box."


7. It has to be portable to other clouds. It can't lock you in to a particular vendor.

"One of the areas where we need an open cloud is to give you the ability to have interoperability and portability across different clouds," Che says. "I should be able to manage a hybrid cloud that spans across all these different technologies."

Open Source Cloud to Avoid Vendor Lock-in

One big step in that interoperability and portability direction is Apache Deltacloud, a project initiated by Red Hat in 2009 and then contributed to the Apache Software Foundation, where it gained Top-Level Project (TLP) status in 2010. With Deltacloud, the Apache Software Foundation is attempting to provide an answer to a problem that hasn't much reared its head yet, but is likely to become pressing in coming years: cloud lock-in.

"The biggest challenge is that there's so much happening in the cloud that users are so busy figuring out how best to use cloud that lock-in is still not a big concern for them," says David Lutterkort, principal software engineer at Red Hat and chair of the Apache Deltacloud project. "It's not that high on peoples' lists yet."

Deltacloud is an API that abstracts differences between clouds, enabling management of resources in different IaaS clouds using a single API. It can essentially be implemented as a wrapper around a large number of clouds, freeing users of cloud computing from dealing with the particulars of each cloud's API.

Standards bodies have also coalesced to create open and interoperable standards. In 2009, leading standards development organizations (SDOs) to form Cloud Standards Coordination, intended to coordinate the work of the various SDOs developing cloud standards. Members include the Cloud Security Alliance, Cloud Standards Customer Council, Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Open Grid Forum (OGF), Object Management Group (OMG), Open Cloud Consortium (OCC), Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information and Standards (OASIS), Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), The Open Group, Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) and TM Forum.

Lutterkort is also a board member of the DMTF, which, among other things, is working on a standard called the Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI), which would create a standard API that any cloud could use.

Project Aeolus is another forward-looking open source project, driven by Red Hat, that essentially seeks to build an open source cloud broker. A stand-alone project, Aeolus offers a single, consistent set of tools to build and manage organized groups of virtual machines across clouds. It consists of the following:

• Aeolus Conductor, which offers a way to provide cloud resources to users, manage users' access to and use of those resources and control users' instances in clouds


• Aeolus Composer, which provides a way to build cloud-specific images from generic templates so users can choose clouds freely using compatible images
  
• Aeolus Orchestrator, which provides a way to manage clumps of instances in an organized way, giving users the ability to automatically bring up a set of different instances on a single cloud or spanning multiple clouds, configure them and tell them about each other


• Aeolus HA Manager, which provides a way to make instances or clumps of instances in the cloud highly available

Red Hat is far from alone in contributing to the open cloud. Rackspace Cloud and NASA have made waves with the OpenStack IaaS cloud computing project, also made available through the Apache Software Foundation. The OpenStack project's mission is to give any organization the capability to create and offer cloud computing services running on standard hardware.

(Sources - http://www.cio.com)

Open Source Empowers Me

Posted 27 Feb 2012 by Colin Dodd

Last month, we conducted a poll asking how open source might have enriched your life. We got a great response. Over 150 people answered, and the comments they left hinted at the personal impact open source has on individuals.

The answers we supplied were slanted towards personal growth or transformation, but "Other" got the most votes, almost twice as many as "Learned a new skill," and more than double "It renewed my faith in humanity." So if open source hadn't enriched someone by helping them "create something of value," or in making them “more open to sharing ideas and opinions," what had it done for them?

The "other" comments were about the power and the freedom open source software gave the respondents. "It empowers me," was not one of our choices, but if it had been, it would have won.

Open source made new things possible for more people. One commenter said, "Open soruce technologies give me freedom...I was the prisoner of proprietary technologies for many years...open source gives me [options] a free choice."

Another commenter pointed out that open source empowers them to help others. They said, "I have also used open source to provide computer systems to people that would otherwise not be able to afford a new one with a proprietary system..."

And don't forget accidental careers. As another commenter put it, "After first meeting it at the university as a Biology undergrad, open source attracted my attentions so much that I actually changed my career to IT 'after' graduating, and since then, I've been working solely in IT, completely focused on open source."

When we talk about open source doing big things - changing the technology industry, or re-orienting the strategy of business, or making the world a better place, we often forget to think about how many individuals are part of this massive transformation, and how their lives are transformed by their participation.

(Sources - http://opensource.com)

Open source needed to save democracy

Open-source software developers face greater risks today than they ever have, to the point where the constraints inherent in proprietary software now represent a risk to democracy, according to one of the movement's leading figures.

"News and political discourse are mediated by software, and they're going to be more mediated in Apple TV than they are today in your computer. And we trust an astonishingly few companies to be the intermediaries between information and the user," said Bruce Perens, creator of the Open Source Definition, at the Linux.conf.au 2012 conference in Ballarat yesterday.

"People love their iPhones, because their iPhones enable them in so many ways, [but] they don't always understand that their iPhones also constrain them," he said.

"People are increasingly slaves of their tools. Part of their function is to not do what they want when their action might reduce the profit of Apple or a media company, or upset a cellular carrier, a government or even when some action is the wrong choice for the computer-naive user — for example, running [Adobe] Flash on an iPhone."

"Open source is the only credible producer of software and now hardware that isn't bound to a single company's economic interest," Perens said.

Despite open software's popularity in some sectors of the community, and the success of some projects, the movement as a whole has failed to defend its own future against the threat of laws designed to regulate the flow of information, such as the US Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and, before it, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

In part, that's because many open-source developers have an attitude problem, says Perens. "Let's face it; most of us don't even like users. We call them 'lusers'. We make the software for ourselves and the other developers. Why should we like them?"

Nothing is more annoying, said Perens, than the complaining user who says that the software stinks, when he's never contributed anything himself.

"We haven't yet developed any sympathy for users that is manifested by companies like Apple ...A good many of us, unfortunately, match the stereotype of socially impaired programmers."

Perens cited the Mozilla Foundation, creators of the Firefox web browser, and Wikipedia as examples of open-source projects that showed the "tremendous self-discipline" needed to appeal to ordinary users.

"Wikipedia [is] intrinsically more accessible to the common person than most of the things that we do ...When our work gratified only ourselves and our community, it's self-limiting,"

Perens said that the open-source movement's goal should be to establish a continuing legal freedom to create, modify and distribute open-source hardware and software.

"It's a simple goal. Open source should be legal. We're at risk from laws that weren't directed at us when we weren't economically significant, for example, software patenting; we've been really lucky with that, because at least in the [United] States it could have shut us down, and it hasn't been used that way," he said.

"We need to be able to make changes if we're going to be able to help ourselves ...We have no reason to trust companies or governments to do this job for us."

(Source - http://www.zdnet.com.au)

Wikipedia to go dark in SOPA protest, Twitter declines by John Ribeiro (IDG News Service)

Wikipedia's co-founder Jimmy Wales said the controversial legislation is far from dead

Wikipedia has decided to black out the English version of the online encyclopedia for 24 hours on Wednesday to protest against controversial legislation in the US, following a cue given by some other Internet sites including social news site, Reddit, which will black out its site for 12 hours on the same day.

Twitter's CEO Dick Costolo however said in a message on Twitter that "Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish".He later clarified that he was talking about Twitter and not about Wikipedia's decision.

Wikimedia Foundation said on Monday that the Wikipedia community had chosen to black out its English version to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate.

[ Get the latest IT news on the Australian government and businesses in omputerworld's Business & Government newsletter ]

"If passed, this legislation will harm the free and open Internet and bring about new tools for censorship of international websites inside the United States," Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, said in a statement on its website.

Three officials of U.S. President Barack Obama's administration issued a statement on Saturday on legislation including SOPA, the Protect IP Act (PIPA), and the Online Protection and Digital ENforcement Act (OPEN), in response to petitions.

"While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet," said the statement which was signed by Victoria Espinel, the White House intellectual property enforcement coordinator, Aneesh Chopra, U.S. chief technology officer, and Howard Schmidt, special assistant to the president and cybersecurity coordinator for the National Security Staff.

The statement did not directly say whether the White House opposes SOPA or PIPA.

Trevor Timm, an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said on Monday that the Obama administration drew "an important line in the sand" by stating that it will not support legislation "that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet".

Yet, the fight is still far from over, he said, as the Senate is still poised to bring PIPA to the floor next week, and SOPA proponents in the House are likely to try to revive the legislation, unless they get the message that these initiatives must stop.

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's cofounder, said on Twitter on Monday that "Rumors of the death of SOPA may be premature" and added that "PIPA is still going strong". "But the best action for twitter might be to let us continue to use the service to organize our protests", he said.

Wikipedia urged readers in the U.S. to contact their elected representatives in Washington, or the foreign ministries of their countries, if they are users outside the U.S., to tell them that "you oppose SOPA and PIPA, and want the internet to remain open and free".

Reddit said last week that instead of the "user-curated chaos of reddit", it will be displaying a message about "how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit, link to resources to learn more, and suggest ways to take action".

Google, Yahoo, Facebook, legislators, and some key personalities like Internet pioneer Vint Cerf have opposed the SOPA legislation.

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John's e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com

(Source - http://www.computerworld.com.au)

Watching Open Source Destroy Capitalism

About twenty years ago one of my college housemates, Jerry, had an idea.

“What if you could send music over the internet?”

This was the age of 2400 baud modems that made crazy high pitched noised while they tried to connect to the internet. My 20 megabyte external hard drive for my MacPlus computer had set my parents back about five hundred bucks. High quality digital audio files were about the same size as they are now (about ten megabytes per minute of audio). In other words, I couldn’t even fit a single digital audio track on my expensive hard drive — I worked exclusively in MIDI.

So I forgive myself for my lack of vision at the time. I thought Jerry’s idea was ridiculous, and I let him know. Digital audio files were way too big, bandwidth was way too narrow. It would never happen.

Jerry persisted. What if a music file could be compressed? What if bandwidth increased? He pointed out that it would change everything about the way music was distributed, maybe even the way it was made.

Jerry didn’t go on to invent Napster, but he was absolutely right. Sending digital files over the internet would change everything. It would radically disrupt the music industry. It would also make producing, distributing, publishing, and even promoting music more accessible to the average musician and music producer. For the consumer, it would make music essentially free (illegally at first [early Napster], and now legally [YouTube, Spotify, etc.]). And a computer company would become the biggest music distributor.

Jerry saw it coming early on, but I actually lived through it. I co-founded Loöq Records with Spesh in 1998. For years we made and sold vinyl records and CDs. As soon as we could sell our music in digital download format, we jumped on the opportunity. Good thing, because dance music vinyl sales crashed (everywhere except Germany, but that’s another story). We never made much money selling vinyl, but we had to stop entirely when average sales dropped from the low thousands to the low hundreds.

Selling music digitally turned out to be more profitable, because production costs were so low. Also, we never ran out of inventory. On the down side, sales were much lower. People could easily make copies and share the music. In addition, the number of small independent music labels ballooned massivelybecause the financial risk of putting out music was so low. In our vinyl days we were risking at least two grand on each release, often closer to four. Putting out a digital release costs, well … nothing. So the competition, and choices for the consumer, increased dramatically. As a record label, we had to completely reevaluate the reasons for our existence as a company.

Recently, we’ve seen streaming services (like Spotify and Pandora) and sharing services (like SoundCloud) cut into digital download sales the same way digital downloads cut into vinyl and CD sales. Music is now free, legally, for any reasonably tech-savvy consumer (less costs of internet and/or phone service).

Strangely, Loöq Records is more profitable than ever. Even as sales continue to plummet, other income sources increase or stay steady. We were lucky enough to enroll some of our catalog very early in YouTube’s AudioSwap program, and we’ve seen tens of thousands in revenue from AudioSwap shared ad revenue. We receive performance royalties from ASCAP for the dozens of tracks we’ve licensed to TV shows like CSI. Once in awhile we license a track to a videogame or film. So even though sales are terrible, business is good. I don’t know if this is due to good business acumen or freakish good luck, but I suspect the latter.

For the most part, file sharing (voluntary and involuntary) and music streaming have destroyed music sales revenue.

Open Source and Capitalism are Incompatible Systems

Pretty much.

According to wikipedia, open source is a philosophy or pragmatic methodology that promotes free redistribution and access to an end product’s design and implementation details. It is usually used to describe the development process for large collaborative software projects, like Linux. More recently, the use of term has broadened to include any project where the methods and means of production are publicly shared. TheOpen Source Ecology project, which provides blueprints and detailed instructions for building heavy-duty farm and construction equipment from commonly available, inexpensive parts, is a great example.

So, a few bullet points to describe open-source in plain language:

• the means of production, both material (stuff) and intellectual (techniques or methods) are free/cheap/easily obtainable
• distribution is wide and decentralized (peer-to-peer or multi-node, not controlled by a single party)
• the end-product is often free, or radically less expensive than proprietary options

The music industry still consists of proprietary players (including my company, Loöq Records), but music culture has been open-sourced, and this spirit now pervades the more enlightened aspects of the music industry. Music is radically less expensive to produce (a laptop with good software in capable hands can now compete, in terms of sound quality, with a multi-million dollar studio). For most musicians and producers (and many labels), getting their music heard and appreciated is more important than making money. To this end, artists are willing to share streams or files directly with their peers and fans. Many artists are also willing to share “remix parts” (the source sounds that make up a recording).

Does this reduce the amount of money exchanged? Yes, drastically. While open-source culture is great for the consumer, and even good for the artist in some ways, it’s terrible for the business of selling music.

Capitalism is based on scarcity. In order for the principles of supply and demand and “self-regulating” markets to function as expected, production and distribution channels need to be privately owned and tightly controlled.

Open-source destroys scarcity. When the means of production are free or very cheap, when distribution is free, and when producers prioritize values other than profit (things like social value, or status/bragging rights), then prices move quickly towards zero.

This is great for users. It’s terrible for capitalism.

Open Source Will Affect Everything

Open-source only applies to sectors where content can be digitally replicated and shared over the internet, right?

Wrong, it applies to everything.

When I shared this idea with a friend, he said “What about gasoline? Obviously open-source production and distribution methods don’t apply to extracting, refining, and distributing gasoline.”

True enough, but open-source can easily be applied to energy production. For example, here’s a video that demonstrates how to make your own solar panels. For now, this kind of thing only appeals to hardcore DIY nerds, off-grid survivalist types, and the like.

But imagine a scenario like this. Your neighbor knocks on your door.

“Hey J.D., do you want to join the local neighborhood energy co-op? We already have enough panels (made from an open-source design), so all you have to do is pay a $200 connect fee. At that point your electric bill will drop to about half of what it is now, and if you later decide to add some panels to your property the co-op might start paying you.”

It’s already happening. Both small and large-scale energy cooperatives already exist.

A single high-quality open-source product or service can invade and dominate a sector, like kudzu or Asian carp. It has a combination of traits that is lethal to its native, proprietary competitors. Consider:

• radically less expensive to buy or implement, often free
• ubiquitous availability
• free to use in any way the user wishes
• free to modify and customize
• well-tested in the field
• a community of active developers eager to respond to feedback and improve the product

Eventually, 100% of the global economy will feel the impact of open-source. I think it will play out something like this:

2000: Easy to download free music, many free software options for tech nerds/programmers, philosophies of both Open Source and Free Software movements are well-developed, Creative Commons founded in 2001

2010: Free music becomes industry norm, blogs share content freely, many creative works (music, photographs, books) published under Creative Commons, big chunk of entertainment is user-generated, high-quality free and/or open-source options for many types of software (OpenOffice.org,Firefox, Twitter, etc.), dozens of non-profit/non-proprietary energy co-ops,KhanAcademy.org provides over 2,500 free educational videos and helps tutor millions of kids, unlimited amateur/user-generated free porn

2020: High quality open-source and/or free options will exist for every type of software (open-source equivalents of Photoshop, Cubase, Logic, CAD, Facebook, search, mapping, etc.). Open Source Ecology will succeed in publishing production kits for at least 50 industrial machines, including a 3D scanner, 3D printer, wind turbine, bioplastic extruder, laser cutter, cement mixer, tractor, hay baler, induction furnace, robot arm, etc. Food production will become less centralized, with large numbers of small farmers and urban farmers sharing open-source agriculture techniques, and using non-proprietary seed stock.

2030: Consumer electronics will feel the hit as 3D printers allow consumers to print out their own circuit boards (pulling from a database of open-source blueprints) and make their own electronic stuff.

2040: Open-source AI’s will be available to do complex design, analytical, programming, managerial, organizational, research, and other intellectual work.

2050: Star Trek replicator technology. “Earl Grey, hot.”

Economic Effects (Massive Disruption)

The spread of open-source options doesn’t mean the end of economic activity. I suspect people will always be willing to pay for a sparkling brand, or the very highest quality, or things made carefully by hand.

But many industries are going to experience severe and rapid revenueshrinkage, and they may not see it coming.

To some extent, the internet, digital replication, and plummeting costs of production just shuffle revenue. Apple Computer steals revenue from the major labels. Google steals advertising revenue from newspapers and television networks. People pay AT&T and Comcast for bandwidth instead of paying for music and movies.

But it’s more than a shuffle. Revenue is actually going away. More and more stuff is becoming free, and the trend is just getting stronger.

So is that a good thing or a bad thing? I think it depends on where you live, and what your skills are.

Open Source Will Disrupt Your Life

Open-source culture creates wealth (less expensive, often higher quality goods and services for consumers), but it also destroys jobs. College kids can download all the music they want for free and thumb their noses at greedy record executives, but the record industry isn’t hiring those college graduates anymore.

Apple, Google, and Facebook employ half of Silicon Valley, but what’s to prevent users adopting an open-source version of social networking (one with no advertising, where you fully control your own data), or using BandCampinstead of iTunes? These things can happen quickly. Friendster, anyone?

If your job isn’t yet threatened by open-source methodology, consider what will happen when home 3D printing becomes a reality (of functioning devices, not just plastic models). Consider an open-source version of Siri, version 10, an AI that can not only program your appointments, but can write software, compose music, make money management decisions, supervise a team of robot farmers, etc. Will your job be safe then?

Incease Civic Wealth, or Else

If I lived in a country that valued civic wealth, one that offered universal health care, free public education (including early childhood and four-year college), a great public transportation system, solid energy infrastructure, and other civic perks, I’d be saying “bring it on!”

Open source/free may disrupt revenue streams, but it provides an enormous boon to the average citizen. High-quality products and services are suddenly much less expensive, easier to use and modify, etc.

The problem is, the open-source/free movement tends to concentrate revenue streams, not spread them out. There is less need for labor, and less revenue to pay employees. Business owners do fine if they run lean, but there are fewer jobs. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Maybe the open source/free movement is also a solution to this problem (you might not need a job if most stuff is free), but I suspect that the economic disruptions caused by open source/free, and recent technological innovation in general, will lead to increasing income equality, social unrest, class warfare, and possibly even fascism, unless balanced by more progressive taxation policies and increased civic wealth (social democracy, or something better).

In the long run, we need to remodel our economy so that we are providing for each other instead of exploiting each other.

What Should You Do About It?

So, I’ve been riffing here. Some of you might think I’ve used the term “open source” too loosely, too interchangeably with “free software” or “peer-to-peer” or even “digital economy.” Maybe I have, but I hope my main points have come through:

• the means of production and distribution of practically everything are becoming more and more open and accessible
• people are creating and sharing non-proprietary solutions, designs, and works that are often of equal or greater quality than the proprietary options
• these trends will disrupt every sector of the global economy by shattering scarcity and centralized monopolistic control
• these disruptions will result in many benefits for the average person, but they may also destroy your job

On the last point especially, what can you do about it?

• you can create a realistic personal economic plan based on your temperament
• you can try to anticipate when and how open source/free/peer-to-peer is going to affect your industry
• you can expand your economic options by engaging in accelerated learning of skills that are in high demand
• you can master the odd, unnatural, rarely taught skills needed to thrive in modernity
• you can move to a country that values civic wealth, if they’ll let you in (and you can handle the cybernetic discombobulation)
• you can invest energy in influencing the policies and politicians of your own country toward creating more civic/public wealth (education, healthcare, public health, recreation, transportation, etc.)

One final note … SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) can be seen as an attempt to slow down some of the trends I discussed in this post, but it is in fact a step towards fascism. On a social level, the correct response towards the open-source/peer-to-peer/free trend is not censorship and centralized control, but rather increasing civic/public wealth.

(Sources - http://jdmoyer.com)