The Right Open Source Argument

A lot of smart people are making arguments for open source, net neutrality, and Internet values.

Doc Searls (right) is among those who make great  technological arguments. Matt Stoller is just one of many who make great political arguments.

The winning arguments are economic arguments. These are the arguments that will win the day.

And the best economic argument is the simplest one.

Sharing accelerates innovation.

In order to compete economically we need to accelerate change. We need to be free to work together in order to do that. Rapid back-and-forth communication is the only way to get the upper hand on such competitors as China, which fear free thought and thus repress it.

Open source and a free, wide Internet are the only ways we can do this. A proprietary model benefits only the owners of specific inventions, who then can work only within their silos to exploit them. 

We have seen how university research, technological innovation, and  human communication are all hampered when access to the tools of thought are limited. Free people, free groups, and free thought are the way to economic growth.  As it was  in the beginning of our country, so it is now. Only more so. 

Our backwards laws have a direct impact on innovation, which in turn impacts economic growth. We need a post-industrial legal system so we can learn and innovate faster.

A system that benefits mainly the creators of earlier inventions, or generations'-old content, is less efficient at creating new stuff.  The key to gaining the benefits from innovation is being first to market, in volume. Anything else is eating your seed corn.

We can see this in the open source marketplace. A growing commons of software code enables innovation in every direction. It's not just the software companies involved in open source which benefit, but any other companies which want to use that code, or combine that code, in order to create new services, new businesses, new value.

We had much faster technology growth in the 1990s, with a free Internet, than we have had this decade, with a limited Internet. Other countries have been able to catch up with the U.S. this decade, even surpass us in many areas (like wireless) because our innovators have been hamstrung.

For our economy to grow we need not only to free our people as individuals, but as groups, and as companies. We need more engineers, more writers, more developers in every area, fewer lawyers and accountants. Lawyers and accountants can only deal with the past, with past actions. Innovators create the future.

What has been happening is that the proprietary industries have monopolized the economic argument. It is in a proprietary company's individual interest that its own past assets be highly valued, and that few new assets be created elsewhere. That's true. But it is not in the nation's interest, not in the national economy's interest, that the future should be hamstrung by the past.

This is the argument we need to start making, now. We need to be making it in the blogosphere, but also in the media. The sooner these arguments are understood and implemented in our policy, the sooner we can become competitive again.