IP Longevity Through Open Source

You never forget working for your first vendor.  I was reminded of this at the SUSEcon conference last November, when I met a young colleague who had recently started with the company and was overflowing with enthusiasm for the culture, workmates, and feel of the workplace compared to his previous experiences.  I saw the same degree of enthusiasm in former colleagues at NetApp, who had grown up with the company, and invested themselves completely in the company culture, even as it went through change.  My own experience with Sun Microsystems was also a match: there was something special about working in a place which, especially for a technologist, offered access to such great ideas, people, equipment & opportunities. For me, this was compunded by being there during the dotcom boom.

While I was at Sun, the place seemed to be brimming with innovation - we were proud of our brilliant ideas & cutting-edge execution. There were a few less-enthusiastic, or perhaps better said as "more realistic" people who didn't look through such rose-coloured glasses. These were the folk who had come to Sun from elsewhere - places like DEC (Digital Equipment Company), which had previously been one of the go-to places & hotbeds of innovation. They could see the good times wouldn't last, and in the end were proved correct.

It seems there has been a constant stream of "innovation" companies, each in turn attracting enthusiastic contributors, building great technology, and then folding or being consumed by some larger organisation that ultimately fails to capitalise on the innovations. The tragedy here is that as the smart people leave these companies, and the intellectual property gets buried under legal constraints, the innovations get lost, and the next generation effectively has to start from scratch. Sun's amazing technology & concepts of the late 1990's & early 2000's has only recently become part of the mainstream understanding (in 1997, no-one could understand what "the network is the computer" meant - modern smartphones demonstrate the concept completely), yet a lot of companies today are re-inventing the capabilities of the last generation of technology Sun developed before the decline & loss of personnel.

This is where free & open source is so interesting: once ideas expressed in open source are exposed, they are forever available, so the demise of a particular company doesn't bury the intellectual property (even if it does mean a lot of the workers on a project may not be able to spend as much time on it). Perhaps as more and more development moves into open source, we'll have less re-invention of the wheel (or even less out & out ignorance of what has come before).  

So long as we can work out a way to agree on licensing schemes....