The so called virtual reality Guru, Jaron Lanier, long known for his criticism of “Wisdom of Crowds” attitude of Open Source development model and the Internet Collectivism (so called Web 2.0), recently wrote an article called Long Live Closed Source Software. I call his article as “Ignorance of an Individual”. In his article, he argues against open source process and calls upon the scientific community to not fall into the trap of the open source development model. I don’t know much about this dude but he comes out as someone who thinks that he can talk about science just because he attended a scifoo camp (a meeting where most of the participants are from the fringes of science. They do invite some hardcore scientists but mostly can be classified as a fringe group of geeks and people with experience in science. Well, such a meeting is important because it helps drive discussion about the interface between science and technology. But, my argument is that attending a scifoo meeting alone doesn’t make an individual a scientist). He uses Martha Stewart and Science in the same sentence and I am sure it talks about how much science he knows. If he had ever been in the hardcore academia, he would have understood that science is not trying to take the open source approach and, in fact, open source approach is an outgrowth of how science is done in the academia. Richard Stallman didn’t jump out one day and talk about free software. It was his experience in an academic environment that raised his awareness about the importance of sharing software code. If Mr. Lanier shows iPhone as an example of innovation, I can list Rockets, Theory of Evolution, Splitting of Atoms, Quarks, Nuclear Energy, and every other scientific innovation as an example of open source innovation because the academia’s approach to science is the predecessor to open source approach. In front of all the innovation listed above, Iphone comes as a kid’s toy made in a third world country. This is the kinda problem we face when engineers, marketers and business community start poking their nose into science. They just talk rubbish. I am not saying that these people should be kept away from science. They are very important for the commoditization of scientific innovation. They are the ones who takes the fruits of science to the ordinary citizens. My argument is that they should realize the scope of their role and not poke their nose into hardcore science. Science knows how to progress and thatz why the world is where it is today. I don’t expect people to understand the scientific process but I expect people to keep the “ignorance of individuals” away from science. Just because someone got to hobnob with Martha Stewart in a scifoo meeting doesn’t give the person right to talk nonsense about how science should be done. Lemme quote a paragraph from his article which clearly shows his ignorance about how science is done in the universities.
Academic efforts are usually well encapsulated, for instance. Scientists don’t publish until they are ready, but publish they must. So science as it is already practiced is open, but in a punctuated way, not a continuous way. The interval of nonopenness—the time before publication—functions like the walls of a cell. It allows a complicated stream of elements to be defined well enough to be explored, tested, and then improved.
Lemme explain here about what happens inside the walls of science laboratories. As a person who has spend 8 years doing physics in academia and someone who is still involved in academia due to some personal reasons, I can talk with clarity. There is some amount of secrecy today among certain groups in the scientific community but it is a recent phenomena. Partly, it is due to the competition for patents started off by companies in areas like chemistry and biology. This has spilled over to other branches of sciences too. If you start looking at the golden period of physics when people like Einstein, Bohr, Dirac, etc. were hobnobbing with each other to even the later periods of Feynman, Murray Gellman, etc., you will understand that science was done in a perfectly open source approach. Unlike what Mr. Lanier portrays, science was not done in bursts of secrecy. He calls the period between start of a research project to the publication of the results/findings in a scientific journal as a period of secrecy. I am pretty convinced that he has never participated in a scientific research project. Anyone with a background in science know about the level of communication that happens between scientists from around the world using letters (now email), telephone calls, discussions during conferences, even visits to other universities/institutes for discussion, etc.. All these communications takes place without the need for any kind of NDAs. If the approach of scientists during the so called period of silence was anywhere close to what Apple, Microsoft or Google do, they wouldn’t have conversed with fellow scientists in their field (including their competitors). Even in the 1990s, when I was doing science, I have done the same thing. This approach continues even today in most of the scientific community. Such actions by scientists is what we, in the software field, call as open source approach. In fact, this kinda sharing takes place even during the current day ultra competitive environment with companies in the scientific mix. Another point which he is quoting but failing to understand about the scientific process is that all the scientists in academia publish their research in scientific journals. Anyone, in any part of the world, can build on the published work, make modifications to the published experimental methods, extend the models, etc. This is open source approach.
I strongly suggest that Mr. Lanier should go around marketing Iphone and leave science to people who are capable of doing it. Science is better off without such nonsense. Open Source has done remarkably well by shifting the whole marketplace towards another era. Ignorance of an individual cannot demolish the wisdom of the crowds. Period.
January 7th, 2008 at 1:16 am
You could add that scientists feel that the lack of openness is harming science, which is why we are clamoring for open data and open access. A true open ethos, as opposed to the quasi-open approach practiced today.
Also, the #1 reasons scientists don’t publish till they are ready is because they are afraid of getting scooped. Most would love to discuss their science openly.
January 7th, 2008 at 1:36 am
Exactly. In fact, I wanted to write about the discussion about Open Science and then link back to your blog. I dropped the idea because people who have no understanding about what is behind open science idea will end up thinking that Mr. Lanier is right.
February 8th, 2008 at 6:03 am
Hmm..funny the iPhone runs a unix variant..
If they had to do the os first and then the other innovative bits, do you think they would have got to the innovative bits?
I havent read the original article yet..going to
February 20th, 2008 at 2:59 am
There would always be people that insist on old ways of thinking. I have to agree with you that the attitude that is expressed in the article doesn’t sound very scientific and in any case it really doesn’t matter what he or other people say the issue seems to have a dynamic of it own.
March 3rd, 2008 at 1:27 pm
I read Jaron Lanier’s article in Discover, and I thought it had some interesting valid points. I saw your comment on CNet claiming a rebuttal and therefore hit upon your rant.
First off, I’m not quite sure if it is due to the limitation of the software you use, but your reply is exceedingly difficult to read because it is so poorly formatted.
Second, your reply contains numerous spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, showing a lack of professionalism and polish. I find it difficult to believe that you have spent all those years in academia without learning how write properly.
Third, the reply is disorganized and lacks a coherent point, are you attempting to discredit Mr. Lanier’s association as a premier scientist or are you trying to argue that academia offers an “open source” model? Either way, both arguments are weak.
If you actually read Mr. Lanier’s article more closely, he is not arguing that Open Source is inherently bad, but that the whole Open Source movement has been attempting to replicate existing technologies (many of them originally closed sourced) instead of trying to innovate. Mr. Lanier is by no means wrong, whatever his credentials may be. Linux is a replication of Unix, the GNU project has replicated the existing editors, libraries, compilers, and toolset commonly found in UNIX. X, Gnome, and KDE have replicated the GUI popularized initially by the Mac and later by Windows. Many of the tools in the open source community, such as 7-Zip and Filezilla, are recreation of commercial apps such as Winzip and CuteFTP.
As of true innovation within software such as the Relational Database, the Spreadsheet, OO languages, presentation software, graphics software, the web browser etc., all of these were essentially popularized initially by commercial closed sourced companies. In other words, there has been really little innovation in terms of a radical design in the Open Source community that has gained any significant momentum.
However, Mr. Lanier is not completely correct. One may argue that the open source software community has produced something that is truly innovative in the form of Apache and other server sided technologies. Apache was the first truly robust, multiplatform web server in existence and its continued evolution and popularity has not only spawned countless websites, but a whole technological eco-system. Its modular nature has allowed the proliferation of server side technologies and provided a common platform for web applications.
In essence, Mr. Lanier is complaining about the lack of innovation within open source software in general. However, I find that Mr. Lanier’s metrics are too demanding. By his metric, there is relatively little innovation in ANY given field, whether it be academia (Richard Feynman once complained that in physics there were very few original fashionable ideas but lots of followers of those ideas) or within technology (notice how every popular language with few exceptions is ALGOG derived and follows the basic OO semantics, or that we are still stuck with the concepts of CPU, GPU, memory, and IO devices in today’s computers, a design that is well over fifty years old). Mr. Lanier’s arguments are based on selective examples, and do not take the history nor the context in which innovation occurs.
In the future, when rebutting someone else’s article, please attempt to do so in a more coherent, thought out fashion. One should expect a modicum of professionalism…
March 3rd, 2008 at 6:22 pm
I usually don’t respond to childish and immature rants. But I have a suggestion for you. If you ever want to be taken seriously in the blogosphere,
1) Don’t even worry about pointing out spelling and grammatical errors. It is for kids to worry about
2) Before calling any argument weak, try to show it is weak. As long as it is not done, your comment deserves nothing in response.
March 4th, 2008 at 9:04 am
Proper spelling and grammar are important, as they tend to distract people from the message. I know this is not always the attitude in Academia, but they make the message more difficult to understand. However, they do not invalidate the content of message as long as it can unambiguously be understood.
Proper command of spelling and grammar is different from being a good scientist. Many scientists have a form of dyslexia, but that didn’t stop them from being scientists.
March 4th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
I agree with Jeroen, but I don’t see any huge mistakes in this blog. It’s very informal, and I’m not very well-versed in the blogosphere, but it’s still quite coherent. I thought blogs were essentially an e-journal of discussion. Using that definition, this article seems very well placed! Anyway, on to my stand on this issue.
In our current economy, it’s very hard for open-source to fluorish with original ideas. Without donations, where will the developers and researchers get the money to support themselves and their projects? This certainly takes away from the ability and aptitude of an open source development scheme to create original ideas. In theory, open source is the best way to deal with scientific and research issues, but in our current political state, things are just hard. I wholeheartedly agree with the wisdom-of-crowds approach, but it would be nice for more corporate funding.
I’m just speaking in theories, though. Maybe I have no place to agree or disagree without my own experience.
March 6th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Jeroen,
I agree with you about the spelling and grammer aspect in the creative writing process. Blogosphere is not creative writing. It is just a bunch of thoughts put out in open for people to discuss. Neither the scientific community nor the tech blogosphere worry so much about cosmetic things. I would rather spend my time on the content than spelling and grammar. When I write a blog post on the run, before I forget the idea that just splashed and which I think is worth discussing, spelling and grammar are last of my priorities. I am not writing a book to win pulitzer award. People like Phosphordyson are just immature people as far as I am concerned. It is just the case of priorities. I can hire someone paying $10 per hour to write articles with good spelling and grammar. You don’t need brain to do that and just a hand to type will be more than enough. However, you cannot pay $10 to someone and get the ideas. So our priorities are different. Hope I have put my point correctly.
March 6th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Daniel,
I agree that the open source developers need money to live. However, corporate world was hijacked by a narrow vision of keeping everything closed. It did work well for sometime. Now we are seeing a paradigm shift. Companies are embracing open source in big numbers. If Microsoft is trying hard to get into OSI, it speaks volumes about the direction the IT world is going to take. Big money acquisitions like Mysql will help create a climate where corporate world will thrive with an open source approach. It is just a matter of time before proprietary format is relegated to where typewriter is today.
April 23rd, 2008 at 3:49 pm
[...] him to realize that opensource itself was inspired by the scientists in academia. Bill Gates joins Jaron Lanier in his ignorance about [...]