Open is better than closed

A decade ago, open source was an anathema to most tech companies; today, it’s so common as to be almost beyond question.

A good article in Venture Beat, “It’s actually open source software that’s eating the world”, uses the numbers to show the impressive development of open source software over the last decade, concluding that that there’s really nothing much left to talk about and that open models are intrinsically superior to their proprietary rivals.

Actually, the explanation for all this is quite simple: the internet has created an interconnected world, drastically reducing transaction and coordination costs. Before the internet, it made sense to carry out most tasks within the company. But as costs have fallen, it has become increasingly attractive to coordinate resources located outside the firm, where there are more resources that can be marshaled around. Which explains why companies that have traditionally defended the proprietary model, such as Microsoft, are replacing their senior management with people able to understand this revolution and that want to develop a more collaborative culture based on open source software, something that Steve Ballmer once described as “a cancer”.

Microsoft converted its .NET programming framework to open source in November, did the same with its Distributed Machine Learning toolkit in the same month, and…