This is the first in a four-part series about trends in modern-day communication and their implications for the future.
Generosity cannot be measured in dollars and cents. Good will has no numerical value. Yet, on the wild, infinitely growing catacombs of the internet, a new era of digital philanthropy has emerged. And in this new technological age, the internet has given birth to the most-public service, a service that can be evaluated using 0s and 1s.
The phenomenon is known as open-sourcing: the computer nerd’s way to contribute to the web, Windows and the world.
Many of the most fundamental programs on which we rely today are a product of open-sourcing: SilkyMail and Horde, the fundamental email tools of the Boston University community, for example.
And the key to this emerging public service? Collaboration. Here’s how it works.
Step 1: A programmer develops a base code for a new program. Step 2: The programmer makes his code available to the entire world, free and without copyright. Step 3: The world responds, editing and reworking the code to develop a seamless, user-friendly program that can perform vital functions for the average computer user.
Open-sourcing “makes available for free many tools, from software to encyclopedias, that millions of people around the world would have had to buy in order to use,” writes New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in his new book, The World is Flat.
A number of local experts agree.
Mark Withington, principal and founder of PLM Research, a Plymouth-based company that helps midsize businesses take advantage of the potential of the internet, says open-sourcing is the future of innovation, particularly for businesses.
“The whole open-source movement is a concept,” he said. “As individuals, as businesses, we make available the source code to the public. Microsoft — the big kid on the block — will guard [the company’s code] with their life. But there is a huge movement underfoot where programmers and businesses are developing code and giving that code to the community.”
Over the years, Withington explained, companies have viewed intellectual property such as programming code — or, more recognizably, music and songs from popular artists — as “tangible assets.” But, he argues, “software is as much of an art as it is a science, and it is counterproductive to hold on to these things and patent them.”
Enter Chuck Hagenbuch, the young, curly-locked, redheaded developer of Horde and SilkyMail. A known figure in the open-source industry, Hagenbuch has been a lead developer on many open-source endeavors.
Searchable pictures of Hagenbuch are almost exclusively of him locked in an intimate gaze with a computer. Whereas most see a webpage, he sees a collection of code, some of which he may have helped create.
“SilkyMail is a fork of [Internet Messaging Program] that I did the initial work on while working for Cyrusoft over a summer,” he explained, perhaps appropriately, in an email. That initial work blossomed into a major email server that one member of BU’s Information Technology department said had a “good educational, university-college base.”
Withington refers to Hagenbuch’s work as “the proverbial ‘If you build it, they will come,'” because of the influx of responses Hagenbuch got to his fledgling Horde.
Part of the allure of the open-source Horde, according to Jim Stone, BU’s Director of Consulting Services for Information Technology, is that developers can offer suggestions to improve SilkyMail and Horde, and “plenty of people do.”
Open-sourcing, Stone said, is “generous to do, and it’s also extremely efficient and worthwhile.
“The whole world is potentially a developer, and if you like [a particular open-source program], you can use it too. It’s an ongoing process. As people come up with different ideas they’re either incorporated or they’re not.”
Stone said the university’s goal in choosing SilkyMail and Horde was to provide accessible, web-based service to about 50,000 students, faculty and university staff.
Stone’s colleague, Tobias Drewry, a consultant and analyst in BU’s IT office, said he had met Hagenbuch once and learned about the inner workings of Horde and the “public service” that Hagenbuch performs through his work.
“While Chuck does a large portion of the work, the work almost gains a life of its own,” Drewry said. “Chuck and his fellow developers become moderators,” fielding suggestions for improvement from all over the world, some from within the BU community.
But not everyone is enamored with the altruism of open-source developers.
“A programmer does not have to completely forsake ownership rights,” said Boston University assistant professor of computer science Richard West in an email. “There are often restrictions on what can be done to prevent others making commercial gains from the use of open source software.”
West acknowledged the important role that open-sourcing plays in furthering innovation and collaboration, but he said there was an equally important place for commercially sold software and ideas.
“We need a commercial sector that rewards clever ideas and innovation since money needs to be generated somewhere to support the workforce,” he said. “I tend to think of open- versus closed-source software as the socialist versus more capitalistic view of the world.
Certain services make sense to be available to all: just as health care and education should be a right and not a privilege, it makes sense for some software to be ‘free.’ The question is, which software should be open-source? The division is not clear.”
And the growing this new cooperative industry does not just stop with the computer experts. Even state government has acknowledged the phenomenon that is open-source. On the Massachusetts state website, open-sourcing is defined as being “built upon the principle that end users should be given the source code and should be free to use, share, modify and enhance software products.”
The future of open-sourcing is uncertain for now, West said, but both he and software expert Withington saw an important place for open-source code in the future. In fact, Withington revels in the possibilities that open-sourcing has yet to unleash.
“I think that the whole open-source movement is really kind of the next big thing that’s going to happen,” he said, “not only to technology, but just to business in general.”