Open Source as in the software industry

How does open source concept works? To most people from a struggling-to-survive society in the developing or poor country, it sounds rather unbelievable for someone to give up a gold mine.

If you understand the system of a developed country then you could appreciate how brilliant this idea it is. Let us first check its’ meaning from Wikipedia:

“Open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials—typically, their source code allowing users to create user-generated software content. Some consider it as a philosophy, and others consider it as a pragmatic methodology. Before open source became widely adopted, developers and producers used a variety of phrases to describe the concept; the term open source gained popularity with the rise of the Internet and its enabling of diverse production models, communication paths, and interactive communities.^[1] Subsequently, open source software became the most prominent face of open source practices.”

In layman term, you are using something free to create something free for others. How you could survive and make a living out of it? Well, you can’t for all your association and investment in the open source game. Then you might say isn’t it is a stupid idea? It is not. In fact your association would tap you into the mass, the 50 millions populations and you could re-establish yourselves as somebody rather than nobody. For instance like the Skype, this little communication tool used by everybody, its’ creators are not getting rich by distributing or writing the software but they manage to pool up a big mass. Then the capitalist could come along to capitalize on this mass market.

The game plan is as such that you throw out a free gig that could draw a big pool of mass. Then you could sell the mass to capitalist. It is a new formula. Of cause, your idea must be very brilliant to draw the attention of 50 millions people.

What are the other incentives for big companies Sun or Oracle to embrace this concept? The open source forum itself used to draw the attention of thousands talents all over the world. These people would contribute freely without incurring a single cost to tackle a problem. Most of the time, even you want to spend; these errant workforces might not even lay a glimpse over the offer you put up. Open source concept might mean you let go something in turn for something really big. By virtue of today pace in technology development, a new idea wouldn’t last very long before it become outdated. Therefore, if a company could use this tactic to refine an idea to a more commercially-viable stage with little cost; why not?

I personally interested in adopting this concept into architecture practice. It would fundamentally alter the way we practice architecture these days. Wish to find out more? Keep follow up with this blog.