What is the best way to promote the creation and adoption of new software and communications technologies? That was the weighty second panel of ACT‘s day-long innovation session at the Economic Forum 2007 in Krynica, Poland.
All panelists agreed that the future of software innovation is a mixed one – a combination of both open and proprietary licensing. According to, the panel’s moderator, ACT’s Chairman Mike Sax, we see mixed use today and we’ll see it tomorrow.
Petri Peltonen, (Director General, Technology Department, Ministry of Trade and Industry, Finland) emphasized that innovation performance is crucially dependent on strengthening investment in and the use of new technologies by both the public and private sectors. Information and Communication Technologies provide the backbone for the knowledge economy and account for around half of the productivity growth in modern economies.
As one the open source community’s chief advocates, Larry Rosen was on his game. He called the development of open source software the result of community-driven meritocracy. And in response to a question, he professed that he didn’t see problems with legislation that would mandate procurement preferences.
Should there be a limited or expansive role for government regulation and subsidies of ICT? Government shouldn’t be prescribing fixed mandates in such a dynamic industry, said Piotr Stryszowski, an economist at the OECD (who emphasized he was speaking on his and not his employer’s behalf). Piotr is helping conduct an important OECD study on the drivers for software innovation.
Martin Campbell-Kelly, a professor at the University of Warwick, provided a history lesson on "open" and "closed" software. 50 years ago, software was a collaborative process and source code was public domain. But back then software was an afterthought, as companies were more interested in selling huge chunks of steel called computers. It was also of flaky quality.
The 1980s brought closed source software for a number of reasons – warranties of quality, antitrust regulators forced the unbundling of software and hardware, and programmers became really expensive and manufacturers had to think of other ways to recoup investment. Then API’s were developed to obviate the need for the disclosure of source code. Things further changed in the 1990s, because computing is not as hardware intensive, programmers are not as scarce, and the Internet has changed how we communicate and collaborate.
As an economic developer, Ilona Vass (Vice-President, National Office for Research and Technology, Hungary) spoke about her home country. Foreign direct investment is important, but Hungary also wants to spur home-grown innovation. Attracting multi-nationals is a good way to grow native talent, because SME’s spin-off to service these companies.
Our last speaker was IBM’s Bob Sutor. He talked about the spectrum of licensing alternatives between the closed and open endpoints. IBM’s WebSphere is a mix of proprietary and open source software, he said.
IBM is one of the largest intellectual property rights owners in the world, and it is pursuing a business model strategy of giving away the software to sell hardware and services. There’s nothing pure about open source when compared to proprietary software (and vice versa). Each is a competing business model.
But perhaps the biggest threat to both open and closed software (and everything in-between) is software as a service (SaaS) and the kind of on-demand software that Google provides. Watch out Microsoft, APple, Red Hat and Ubuntu!