2 Icons, 2 movements

Last night a thought struck me: there is a striking similarity in how the open source- and snowboarding movements has evolved. Both has been led by strong iconic persons namely Terje Håkonsen and Richard Stallman. They are both controverse untouchables (as in the movie with Kevin Costner), they do and say exactly what they believe in. Their influence has been very important in establishing these movements that is not controlled by any commercial interests, although none of them would have made it this far with commercial support.

Håkonsen is reknown for boycotting the IOC and FIS and olympic qualification for halfpipe when it was introduced in the omlympics. Stallman is so reknowned for his controversery that a lot of people thinks he is just a childish troublemaker.

The reason these movements have become so powerful, even in a commercial sense, is that they consists of large crowds of people. They have to some varying degrees developed ethics and morale, and those not conforming are effectively kind of excluded or frozen out. The crowds is not driven by commercial interests, but it would be false to state that is not commercial interests involved. Snowboarding is not for economically faint hearted, and software development is seldom gratis.

An example showing the power of the Open Source movement: Try to imagine the WWW without the Apache Http Server. It is undeniable the very reason the acronym http is known probably by half or more of the world population. It has lost "market shares", but it is the Apache http Server that has made the widespread deployment of the WWW possible. It has alwasy been on the frontiers of the WWW, and I guess it still is. In addition most application servers has an Apache http Server in front of them to handle caching and serving static content and many other tasks. I think the success for Linux in the server room is largely because of Apache http Server. The Apache Foundation has long been sponsored by IBM.

The Open Source movement has laid a foundation for business, information spreading and social interaction over the internet that would not have taken place or would have looked completely different without it. In fact, I think Open Source has been genuinely good for the internet and computing in general, lowering the bar for adoption. It makes it possible for everyone the freedom of speach if they want to.

Open Source is again showing it's strength in times where financial crisis otherwise might have strangled innovation. Instead innovation on the internet is flourishing, largely powered by Open Source. I think now the movement has become strong enough to transform the software business. I do not dare predict how it will transform it but I think it will be good.

During the US election campaign in 2008 i think I overheard a statement made by John McCain , when he started to realize he was not winning the election: The man (Barack Obama) is a movement. You can't stop a movement.

BTW: This weekend I will do practice som freedom of speech here: http://twitter.com/OfficalWRC