Don’t make a case for Open Source. Make a case for Closed.

I absolutely love this video especially the comments by Jonathan Nightingale (video no longer available). As software developers we should be never justifying the case for open source.

Open is always better. Open source for every project makes more sense.

In the old days your code was your IP and having it closed made sense because it is what you charged for. However, what many corporates now realise is they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for some source code that they then customise with hundreds of thousands more dollars and then they don’t even own the source code and have to wait on a vendor everyday for support.

With Android for Mobile this is less of a problem than what Apple does. It was only the other day I read about a problem with security on Apple that has been open for months. Google has known about it and told them and yet a patch has not yet been released. If this were open source the bug would have been fixed months ago and the security whole could have been closed by the user who found it.

This is why OpenStack is so big. In the Linux server space everything is open source and it is thriving. Why? Because companies still customise there code, still need developers and still need support and none of these services need closed source code. It is not a needed at all and is actually a hinderance.

Once true open source is embraced by more companies and more people we will all be in a better place when it comes to security and freedom on the internet.

So next time, don’t make a case for Open, make your case for Closed.