How open source tears down proprietary advantage
Open source doesn't overwhelm a proprietary system. It whittles away at its lead, slowly and sometimes unsteadily. It's the old Aesop story of the tortoise and the hare, and open source is the tortoise.
(Warner Brothers re-made the Tortoise and the Hare stories in three classic Bugs Bunny cartoons during the 1940s, co-starring Cecil Turtle (right) Here, watch,).
What got me thinking about this was Matt Asay's latest about Twitter. Twitter is the iPhone of crowdsourcing. Actually if iPhone had Twitter's market share people would be screaming for antitrust charges against Steve Jobs.
It's tough to claw back against a Web site with Twitter's advantages. You're either on it or you're invisible. It's very easy to be on it. I spend maybe five minutes a day with it and have 830 people following my every word.
Twitter's monetization of its advantage has so far been very limited. I wrote some time ago that Twitter brings mass SMS to the Web, so there should be lots of money there. But so far there is only a trickle.
That is one reason why sites like Identi.ca have gained so little traction. Money attracts a crowd like blood attracts sharks. Financially Twitter is just an oozing sore.
But the general case is more important than the specific. We have seen open source advancing against proprietary advantage throughout the last decade. We saw Google overtake Yahoo. Linux overcame Microsoft in the server space. We watch Firefox creep up on Internet Explorer. We're watching Android and the iPhone.
Even where open source alternatives haven't overtaken proprietary systems, they have forced adjustments, and lowered profit margins. PostgreSQL implementations will continue doing that to Oracle. Facebook used openness against MySpace.
No lead is completely safe, and no monopoly rents can accrue, when there are viable open source alternatives available. Open source may be a nuisance to Microsoft, but it's not getting into its face the way the Justice Department did back in the 20th century.
Open source springs from dissatisfaction. Open source starts small. Open source moves slowly -- it's not about Internet time but real time. But open source is inexorable. Open source does not stop moving forward. Proprietary companies face limited profits, and snappy customers, because open source is an option.
That's how Twitter will be reeled-in. Slowly, as dissatisfaction rises, as it tries to monetize its monopoly, the groups around projects like StatusNet will start to grow. And we'll wake up one day and say, hey, Twitter does have competition. We just never saw it before.
But now you can be on the lookout for it.