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Winer on Open Source and Campaigns

Following my nose here:

Nate Wilcox sent me a link to a a Daily KOS post mentioning an editorial Dave Winer wrote. Winer was responding to the Dean and Clark campaigns' adoption of Open Source software, as reported in a Wired News article about the Clark campaign's Open Source strategy. The KOS piece also points to a response to Winer blogged by Jim Moore of the Dean Campaign.

I was surprised at Winer's anti-Open Source rant:

One of the reasons American programmers aren't competing here (in America) is that users expect to get software for free, and in that environment little new stuff gets created, and we have to keep creating to justify the greater amount of money we make (over Indians). But if all we make are commodities, then Indians working for low pay beat Americans working for free. (People who work for free have no incentive to please users, or even create usable software.)

How sad to see two leading Democrats fall for, even feed the lie that they can create user-oriented software for free. Shame on both Dean and Clark. They went after the little guy. Who wants a president who does that. Not me. Still looking for someone worth supporting.

Besides which, Open Source isn't "free software." Even free software is, as Richard Stallman says over and over, "free as in freedom, not free as in beer."

As for commoditization, Winer would do well to think about these comments from Tim O'Reilly:

O'Reilly: ....Open source is a contributor to the commoditization of software, but it's not the only contributor. Open standards lead to commoditization. The Web browser is proprietary, but it's a commodity.

Basically, we're really seeing the development of something that's analogous to hardware with the IBM (Corp.) PC. If you look at what happened to the hardware business, there was a transitional period where everybody tried to play by the old rules. It wasn't until Dell (Computer Corp.) figured out that, no, the rules really are different, and the business levers are different, that we saw somebody figure out how to really leverage commodity hardware.

Ian Murdock, the guy who started Debian, and now runs a company called Progeny (Linux Systems Inc.) is right on track with this. Instead of seeing Linux as a product, he sees Linux as a set of commodity software components he can put together for different purposes.

jon posted this at 1:06 PM
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