Take Open Source Beyond Software

The principle engrained in the open source movement is strong that it shall not remain confined to debate in the software circles alone. The others will adopt it, hopefully soon.

Open Source has caught the imagination of nearly everyone and it has come to be synonymous with free but the meaning is rather different.

Open Source relates to source code that is available to the public and refers to software that is created by a community of software programmers rather than a single software company. This allows even the smaller companies to retrofit the software with a little tweaking here and there to best fulfill its unique needs. It gives the company the freedom to tailor the software to its needs. It also gives the company the freedom from the hegemony of the monopolistic behemoths of the software world.

The bigger idea behind open source is not free. Its freedom! And this revolution is too strong that it remains confined to the software domain. Ripples of the open source movement have started to touch other knowledge intensive streams. Unlike a physical asset, which is subject to diminishing returns, knowledge sharing and its use and reuse lead to creation of what is called the network effect. (In a very few cases, sharing may not add incremental value, the Coke paradox as we know it!) It is the creation of a knowledge product that is the most expensive, and with the Internet, the distribution costs tend to approach zero. I will try to augment my argument with an example. A health worker in Kamana, Zambia logged on to website of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and got the answer to a question on how to treat malaria. The result is obvious. And the best part of the whole story is that this happened way back in 1995! While this is an example of access to free information, similar success stories can be created when a lot of “otherwise” proprietary information is put in the free domain.

The reason why I say this is simple. Actually it’s reasons… Lets look at the first one. Once the knowledge asset (if I can call it that!) has been created its use by more and more people can create the network effect, because these users add to, adapt and further enrich the knowledge base. And is that not the very essence of the open source movement?

The second reason builds a stronger case for sharing. Akin to the growth of a tree, knowledge also branches out. As a consequence of this branching out, knowledge becomes fragmented. What this essentially means is specialist knowledge of today becomes the generalist knowledge asset of tomorrow. So a knowledge asset of today will be less valuable tomorrow. So it makes all the more sense to share it today to extract maximum value.

Open Courseware
Outside the software industry, there is still a certain amount of resistance to share knowledge assets. The reason is obvious. While we have reached an era of information democracy, our mindsets are still anachronistic. We still equate knowledge with power. This is true, but the new caveat is that shared knowledge is even more powerful.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology or MIT as most of us know it, announced an initiative to put course material for all of its courses online. Anyone across the world could log in and download it for free. Yes for free! And it did not come as a surprise to me that one of the funding agencies for the project was from one of the pioneers of the global IT revolution.

“…exposure to the teaching of other professors raises the bar and I am sure that individuals will leap that bar,” says an alumnus of MIT. Raising the bar, creating incremental value are the cornerstones of open source. Since it opened to the public on September 30, 2002, users from more than 215 countries, territories, and city-states around the world have visited the website.

What is heartening to know that an Open Courseware is growing in our backyard too. The education department of Kerala has already put textbooks online that can be downloaded for free. Its textbooks, available in portable document format (PDF), are already downloadable.

The benefits are waiting to be accrued. All one needs to do is start sharing…