Section 16.5. Conclusion

16.5. Conclusion

The Open Source Definition and works such as The Cathedral & the Bazaar tried to codify the fundamental principles of open source.

But as Kuhn notes, speaking of scientific pioneers who opened new fields of study:

Their achievement was sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity. Simultaneously, it was sufficiently open ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve. Achievements that share these two characteristics, I shall refer to as "paradigms."^[11]

^[11] Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/13220.ctl), 10.

In short, if it is sufficiently robust an innovation to qualify as a new paradigm, the open source story is far from over, and its lessons far from completely understood. Instead of thinking of open source only as a set of software licenses and associated software development practices, we do better to think of it as a field of scientific and economic inquiry, one with many historical precedents, and part of a broader social and economic story. We must understand the impact of such factors as standards and their effect on commoditization, system architecture and network effects, and the development practices associated with software as a service. We must study these factors when they appear in proprietary software as well as when they appear in traditional open source projects. We must understand the ways in which the means by which software is deployed change the way in which it is created and used. We must also see how the same principles that led to early source code sharing may impact other fields of collaborative activity. Only when we stop measuring open source by what activities are excluded from the definition, and begin to study its fellow travelers on the road to the future, will we understand its true impact and be fully prepared to embrace the new paradigm.