THE ENIGMA OF OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE

James V DeLong

1/01/2005
(Original Publish Date: 2004)

A word of caution is in order. Dissecting this topic requires an understanding of law, programming, history, economics, business strategy, and public policy. No one, includ-ing the author, is adequately equipped in all these areas. Thus, in the best tradition of the software world, this paper is probably full of bugs. Hence the designation of the analysis as Version 1.0. However, on the two major questions posed above - Should governments provide pref-erences for open source software? and; Is the open source approach a template for other products? - the answers are robust. They are: (1) Government preferences would be extraordinarily unwise; and (2) Current open source software is the product of so many idiosyncratic forces that the system producing it is an improbable model for anything, perhaps even including the future production of software.