Michael Dolan Dot Com

Thursday, April 20th, 2006

CED: U.S. should promote open source, open standards as public policy

New report from the CED (Committee for Economic Development) comprised of about 200 senior corporate executives and university leaders concludes open source, open standards, and open innovation should be promoted as a matter of US Public Policy to foster innovation and economic growth.

Of course and IBMer was on board (Research SVP, Paul Horn) but the message of this report is far from “vendor” or company sponsored. This is a clear message that researchers and companies can collaborate and compete “above the stack”. Some may argue “what happens when open source moves up the stack?” Well… the smart companies build on an open source stack say with Apache and Geronimo and then build up/out the stack with features that simplify and enhance an environment. Ultimately open source drives new innovations while it commoditizes others. I take offense when some argue open source is just the commoditization of software. Yes, it levels the playing field and creates standards… but there’s really cool, new innovative ideas out there from the OSS community (see RoR, OpenVZ, Firefox, Gentoo, MythTv and Eclipse for a few innovative examples). Some of these OSS projects like Eclipse create huge markets and create new opportunities for new and existing companies.

How many people thought Java as a standard would create an entire industry? Same for the x86 architecture - went beyond just IBM and created a billion dollar industry. Other “great ideas” that are attempts at restriction standards (ahem… token ring… firewire) tend to find greater difficulty getting traction and go away over time…
Hopefully our laggard lawmakers will see this and support policies intended to foster and grow U.S. leadership in open communities.

Steven Vaughan-Nichols has a nice summary here.