Dana Blankenhorn has been a journalist, writer and part-time futurist for over 30 years.
It's about a sense of entitlement to free access to intellectual property. The only reason it works for software is that there isn't any "manufacturing" involved.
You couldn't say, open source a CPU, knowing you need a billion dollar fabrication plant to manufacture it. The open source-ness of it would have no value without the plant to go with it.
But it works for softwre because some people still think programming should be free for some reason.
This is very good news.
Sourceforge now gets more traffic from Brazil, Russia, India and China (the so-called BRIC countries) than it does from the good old USA.
Roberto Galoppini, who is on the Sourceforge advisory board, reports that while we are still the largest player in the open source world Brazil in particular is catching up.
(The chart is from Sourceforge via Galoppini’s fine blog.)
Galoppini’s main point here is that Italy’s share of the traffic now puts it in fifth place, but the real story is still Brazil, which is now the second-leading open source country.
One reason for that is national policy. Open source has had open source as part of its industrial policy since 2003, which comes with its own government-run portal, called ComprasNet.
That’s not all Brazil is doing to support open source and the commons. Its copyright law has been updated to not just support fair use, but to penalize anyone who “hinders or impedes” its use. In other words, the first anti-DRM copyright law.
This top-down approach to open source, with government and schools adopting it as a matter of policy, has lately led to a large increase in the voluntary adoption of Linux and open source by businesses there.
Government policy does not have to encourage or even mandate open source, but if it does, then it does eventually get results.
