Krishwords

Today, I came across an article by Michael Hickins on eWeek with the title “Is Open Source Dying”. He seems to be perturbed at the chaos going on in the open source community about GPLv3, difficulty in implementing open standards in the govt., etc. As I told in the case of Nicholas Carr’s article, this article is also the result of a misunderstanding on the part of the author about open source. The foundations of open source lies in its democracy. Any democracy is bound to be chaotic. If you look around the world, in places like India, USA and many European nations, the democratic process is mostly chaotic but an order always emerges from this chaos. The pushes and pulls of democracy results in an order. Same is the case with open source. It is a democratic institution and, as in any democratic country, it will be chaotic and an order will definitely emerge from this chaos. This is a result of people getting used to authoritarian regimes of proprietary software companies. In the top down approach of the proprietary companies, it may be easy to get things done fast. But, it is always difficult to do it in a democratic institution like open source. We don’t throw away democracy in our society because it is chaotic. We don’t submit ourselves to an authoritarian rule just to have order. We fight for our democracy because we know that an order will emerge eventually and our rights are protected. It is the same case with open source software. The chaos is not the weakness of the open source software. Rather, it is its strength. From this chaos, we will have an order which protects our rights to access the software code.