Open Source
Open source as a philosophical concept has been around for a while, particularly in the area of software development. The open source philosophy rejects the “trade secret” model of development and replaces it with a wide-open model wherein anyone can review the development of a product or service and, in many situations, contribute to the effort. In the information industry, this often means that users can alter a software program at its source to meet their own needs and then release their work under free license so it can be used and altered by other users. In this way, new features can be added into the core build more rapidly than under a traditional software development framework.
A good example is the Android operating system for mobile devices. Its open source designation means that anyone who wants to develop applications for it may do so. Developers are encouraged to share their new applications with others using the Android Market. This is in contrast with older cell phones, which use closed-source operating platforms. Those phones came with a fixed number of features that the user could not expand or alter.
At its core, the open source philosophy asserts that professionals working in a given industry tend to share common ambitions even if their specific goals differ. As a result, it is often mutually beneficial for a person to make work publicly available for review and expansion by peers. The idea is that this “peer production” leads to a more successful end product thanks to public review and the resulting contributions from professional community members. Those contributions would not have been possible if the product’s plans had not been open source. However, open source development is controversial because it undermines longstanding tenets of business such as traditional standards of copyright, intellectual property dominion, and consumer-corporate relations.
While open source is a widespread philosophical movement, the biggest practical example of it is in today’s software industry. When we look into the history of the movement, open source software is clearly behind the current shift toward a free economy, at least as far as many of the information industry’s software sources are concerned.