Open source roundtable: Bruce Perens

Open source leader views software patenting as the No. 1 impediment to innovation

 

IW: What are the next steps needed for open source as a software production methodology to reach the next level?

Perens: Well, we really are at the next step for a lot of software development. We define the best practices in software development today. After all, how many companies have software staff that are as motivated to work for them as the open source developers are motivated to make something that everybody shares?

Most proprietary software is written with the assumption that nobody's looking over the programmer's shoulder. With open source, the whole world is looking over the programmer's shoulder. Programmers write better code because they know that. Consider what happens today when a programmer is hired. How can any company tell much about the quality of their work? You can't get much good data out of their previous employer, if you can get any. But you can look at their open source code, and you can check out their interaction on the project's discussion lists and see if they are a team worker or a flamer. So, I think a lot of programmers realize today that their open source work is their résumé. That's a big quality incentive.

But what would I like to see for a next step? I would like to aim high. See that Macintosh desktop? It's got great consistency, it treats the user pretty well. Can we beat it? I think it's possible, but it would take strong leadership and a dedicated team.

When I left Pixar in 1999, Steve Jobs still didn't believe that open source could produce a good GUI at all. Two years later, he introduced Safari, which was derived from open source GUI work, while standing in front of a slide that said "open source, We Love It." I guess I won that argument.

IW: Open source now enjoys a rich and complex history, which is largely the result of trial and error over the years. What would you say have been the open source community's greatest missteps, or lessons learned?

Perens: It's a lot easier to talk about missteps of a single company or a single project. The open source community is like an entire economy of software developers or an entire software industry. No real industry has central leadership, it's made up of separate players going their own ways. That makes it much more robust than a single company could ever be.

I see the biggest mistakes as happening in law rather than technology, because they're the ones that are the hardest to fix. Some of them are in courts, others in legislatures. IBM brought the lawsuit that made software patenting legal in the United States. The U.S. patent office actually prohibited software patenting before then. Reversing that prohibition was a big mistake for the entire software industry and the U.S. economy. State Street Bank did the same thing for business-method patents. The U.S. passed DMCA as law, and has pushed it on other countries, and that's very anti-customer and connected with the misguided war on the customer being waged by the music industry. Those are the mistakes I'd fix, if I could.