Open Source

Overview of the ‘Open Source’ System

• Organizations are often instruments of purpose. ¹ Organizations create efficiency by getting individuals to work towards a common goal. However, organizations may confine productivity and block free knowledge flows when a purpose is not commonly shared and clearly defined. ²

• Emerging new technologies tend to benefit from free knowledge flows across organizational boundaries. In the case of innovation, organizational boundaries become the barriers for good ideas to connect and interact. Thus, proprietory ownership of good ideas not only prevents external minds from connecting with internal minds, but also causes internal minds to miss out on the opportunity of good ideas from external inter-connected minds. Opportunity cost can quickly override the ownership benefits and render the good in-house ideas obsolete.

• Without the constraint of organizational boundaries, good ideas can freely inter-connect across organizations, locations, and industries to form new ones, which are otherwise impossible if the source code is “closed” for narrow and pre-defined commercial interests. ³ With free connections between new ideas and the self-regulation protocols within open-source communities, new technologies and new use cases constantly emerge. Thus, open-source developers can continuously crowdsource good ideas and conveniently build on modularized packages to create higher-level complexities.