Open Source is Not Innovative
Jun 22, 2007, 15:45 (26 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by R. Keith Sawyer)
"Quick--name an open source product that's innovative. If you
said 'Linux,' you failed the test. Linux--the darling of
counter-culture programmers, for its 'free software' advocacy and
for providing an alternative to Microsoft Windows--is not an
innovation. It's essentially a copy of another operating system,
called Unix, that has been around since the 1970s. Making a copy of
existing product? No one that I know would call that
'innovation.'
"And Linux isn't unique--the open source model almost never
generates breakthrough innovation. When Krzysztof Klincewicz, a
management professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, analyzed
the 500 top open source projects on SourceForge.net, he found that
only 5 of the 500--one percent--were examples of radical
innovation..."
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