Innovations in Open Source

The Innovations in Open Source

In the open source model the key principles are sharing and collaboration. It gives people the opportunities to bring about innovations and reach out beyond the walls of their organization. Open source is an efficient model for getting higher number of innovations in a faster way for a group of people or organization that shares a common problem or a common opportunity. Innovation drives the businesses and the society. However, many people wrongly believe that most of the innovations are derived from closed source software and developers. That is simply not the case, it is the open source model which has to be thanked for the innovations. . The World Wide Web was a result of open source model and not a closed source model.

There is no concept of centralized control in an open source model; it is a notion of closed source model. The people and organizations come together to work on a single project. The project or the opportunity is the central point which is given importance and not the organization. The concept of open source was born to bring about something new and not to imitate. For several business organizations the innovation factor is more important as it is more realistic and ideal. There are several projects in the open source model which have led to innovation; some are on a small scale and others on a global level. UNIX is one of the first innovation and one of the best innovative software developed. The multi-tasking Operating System among many others is built upon the UNIX platform.

The OpenNebula, Android are some other famous leaders of innovation. OpenNebula provides specific solutions for the numerous data centers, they don’t believe in ‘one and only one’ solution for all. They integrate the existing technologies, innovate and provide the best. Android is another example of open source mobile platform. It is the leader of innovations in mobile field pushing Blackberry and iPhone to the back. Cloud computing is powered by the same model. The infrastructure of cloud is based on the open source LAMP(Linux Apache MySQL PHP) stack.

Open sourcing is not just restricted to the field of technology; it reaches out to the medical, education, business, and government sectors as well. People are recognizing the need to bring about innovations in other important field as well and for this they believe open source model can be effective. It has become an inspiration for the scientific communities and they have started embracing the model to seek solutions to unsolved questions. Science can gain much with this kind of a model and many are affirming this.

The process of innovation and deployment in open source is of course not friction-free, but it certainly looks that way when compared to the corporate world. Corporations are sometimes, hesitant in changing their current practices and strategies. They fail to se that these changes pave the road to long-term innovative gains. This is the reason behind many software innovations not seeing the light.