TAG | What Wall Street can learn from FOSS |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 07 October 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 2 Secrecy, the usage of jargon to confuse would-be customers - these are symptoms of a seriously sick system. The opposite of these practices is precisely what FOSS advocates. (Mind you, there are sharks in the FOSS community too, who preach one thing and practise another. But, thankfully, they are in the minority.) A second lesson that FOSS teaches people is responsibility. When free and open source software is found to be defective, bug-fixes come fast. And they come with full explanations so that people know the cause, the effect and the cure. There is simple documentation about the problem as well. In other words, people stand up and say, this was our fault, this is what caused it, we have fixed it, we are sorry it happened, and these are the steps we are taking to ensure there will be no repeat. This is a major lacuna on Wall Street. Each and every move in prices is shorted back to that mysterious creature "the market', as though no humans are responsible for the many gyrations that see hapless individuals lose millions. Thirdly, free and open source software has some of the best regulation going. The General Public Licence ensures that nobody can yield to base human instinct and try to benefit from the work of others while refusing to share his or her own work. The third revision of this licence has clauses to prevent anyone from using discriminatory patent deals which allow some customers to benefit. There has been little, if any, regulation on Wall Street - open slather has been the order of the day. The wolves have been in charge of the chicken pen. Pare it down to its basic elements and the whole financial crisis has come about due to a simple human attribute - greed. Wall Street has catered to people's greed for a long time and now it is having a bad case of indigestion. That's something which FOSS teaches people to moderate. There is no ban on making money, no precept that one must live the life of a sadhu. But when one takes into account the other principles behind FOSS, the people who do make money off this genre of software tend to curb their greed lest their status in the community suffer. You've seen what happened to Novell when, in a prime example of greed, it decided to sign a patent licensing deal with Microsoft. To call the company a pariah would be paying it a compliment.
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