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The answer to the question

So, the answer to the question “Where is the innovation in commercial open source software?” is: where it always is – moving further up the stack, closer to the end user. Rather than solving general business problems – things like enterprise content management, or customer relations management – ambitious hackers are starting to address the issues that ordinary people need resolving.

That doesn't just mean traditional end-user programs like Firefox or OpenOffice.org, which have obviously been around for years, or mobile systems, many of which are based on a Linux stack. It means truly innovative new projects like GPL'd EyeWriter:

The EyeWriter project is an ongoing collaborative research effort to empower people who are suffering from ALS with creative technologies.

It is a low-cost eye-tracking apparatus & custom software that allows graffiti writers and artists with paralysis resulting from Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to draw using only their eyes.

Clearly, this kind of work is extremely specific, and represents the end-point in the upward progression through the stack from generic, foundational software like GNU and Linux. So, prompted by those nagging historical voices that keep suggesting that open source can't innovate, a legitimate question is: what lies beyond these kind of niche end-user programs? Is open source already past its glory days, as coders increasingly work on smaller, if eminently worthy, projects like the one above? Has it run out of *big*, world-changing projects?

Leaving aside the fact that there are probably still many big projects to be tackled in the future – it's just that we're unable to conceive of them at the moment, just as we were all unable to think of the Web until it was invented – I think there is another way in which open source innovation will continue to address major challenges and change the world in substantial ways.

What I mean by that is the way the key ideas underlying open source – freedom, sharing and openness – along with elements from its Net-based, distributed development methodology are being used in domains outside software, and with great success.

For example, the field of open access, which seeks to make academic research freely available online, was directly inspired by the growing success of free software in the 1990s. Another stimulus for the formulation of open access was the world of genomic databases. Here, the equivalent of the GNU GPL is the Bermuda Agreement, drawn up in February 1996. This mandates that DNA sequences that have been obtained by publicly-funded research groups “should be freely available and in the public domain in order to encourage research and development and to maximise its benefit to society.”

The open data approach of genomic databases is gradually spreading elsewhere, spawning further initiatives like the Open Database Licence, whose terms will probably sound familiar to users of the GNU GPL:

You are free:

To Share: To copy, distribute and use the database.

To Create: To produce works from the database.

To Adapt: To modify, transform and build upon the database.

As long as you:

Attribute: You must attribute any public use of the database, or works produced from the database, in the manner specified in the ODbL. For any use or redistribution of the database, or works produced from it, you must make clear to others the license of the database and keep intact any notices on the original database.

Share-Alike: If you publicly use any adapted version of this database, or works produced from an adapted database, you must also offer that adapted database under the ODbL.

Keep open: If you redistribute the database, or an adapted version of it, then you may use technological measures that restrict the work (such as DRM) as long as you also redistribute a version without such measures.

One important category of data is the non-personal kind held by governments, and a key trend in the last year has been the opening up of these holdings, particularly in the UK, not least because of Sir Tim Berners-Lee's enthusiastic evangelism. And it's worth remembering that Berners-Lee contemplated adopting the GNU GPL for his new-fangled World Wide Web when he released it in 1991, but decided that maybe the world wasn't quite ready for such a radical move, and simply placed it into the public domain instead.

What this indicates is that free software's true innovation – that by sharing ideas for others to build on we can achieve far more than if we hoard them and claim them as things that we alone, “own” – is alive and well and spreading. Indeed, I would go further: this “new” open source, the one that lies beyond coding, will actually prove to be an even greater achievement than everything we have seen so far in the world of computing, transforming vast swathes of human activity. So much for open source being unable to do anything new...

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca. For other feature articles by Glyn Moody, please see the archive.

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