Yesterdays news article in Computer Sweden has been a hot topic for Swedish open source-related forums, mailing lists and chatrooms today. Myself I wrote about this news article yesterday, but during the day today I’ve been thinking more about it and read others, and their co-workers and friends, opinions on this topic.

One of the more interesting opinions I read about was that closed source has better quality but they should use open source to strenghten the code base. Since the most commonly used open source license requires that the code will continue to be open source using it in a closed source application will require it to be released as open source. Poor unenlightened people, isn’t that a catch 22?

Closed source applications are produced to gain money for a company and it needs to bring in more money than it costs to develop the application to gain any profit. When a release date is set there is a deadline to keep up to for the sake of the trademark and the profit. As everyone that works with computers know it’s always something that delays everything in a project when you’re almost there and for the sake of the trademark it’s quickfixed, which doesn’t really provide any quality to the code. What’s even more terrible than the quickfixes is that in most cases they’re never fixed since they get the work done.

You may ask yourselves why companies are still using closed source if there’s quickfixes that are never fixed and maybe potentional security risks due to lack of time and/or money to keep within the deadlines and budgets, but how would you know that it could have been done better and more secure if you don’t know how it’s done now? Ofcourse the developers know about it and are able to fix it, but frankly they usually don’t bother since noone complains since the application gets the work done and they don’t use their own application in a large scale environment so they’ll never be affected by it.

Open source on the other hand is mainly developed by people that needs the applications themselves, everyone can correct someone else’s code or rewrite a function completely to fit their need better or just improve performance. Everyone I know, including myself, that contributed to open source or even developed their own applications are feeling honoured that others want to use their code. In open source it’s not about money or profit, it’s all about fast, secure and optimized code, in short good quality code.

There is one simple thing that will give the open source community the strength to defeat closed source, patents and monopoly in the IT-industry, passion!

“Het debat om stängda program” – Computer Sweden 2008-11-13

This morning I was meet by a newspaper saying “Closed source is better”, but that’s not really what surprised me. What really surprised me was the fact that it wasn’t an expert in any way that made this statement, but a LAWYER. How would she know?!

This lawyer, Malin Forsman, believes that closed source has better quality than open source even though many researches point the other way. She also praises Microsoft’s security updates as an example of great and fast resolution plans when their trademark is at stake. Her argument is that with money in the picture everyone will be pressured to deliver quality code. To that we can add that most open source developers are paid for developing open source applications which means there’s money in the picture and from her argument that would mean they’re pressured to produce quality code.

Companies like Sun and IBM who’s been on the market for longer than most companies producing closed source only are setting their focus on open source. IBM pays their own personeal to develop applications like Eclipse and Sun bought MySQL together with the open source database they develop with the same name. On top of this Sun decided to release their former closed source operating system partly as open source, did that decision result in poor code quality over night?

Back to my main question, is it really a lawyers place to decide wheter open or closed source has the better quality? What does a lawyer know about code quality, functionality and advanced applications anyway? Another concern I have about this lawyer is the fact that she used to work for Microsoft, which ofcourse wasn’t mentioned at all in the news article, does she still run their errands or is it that she just doesn’t get paid from anyone using or developing open source code since it’s pretty hard to intrude on the intellectual property when it’s given away for free?

“Bäst kvalitet på stängd kod” – Computer Sweden 2008-11-12
Malin Forsman @ LinkedIn