“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…”
Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.
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