Commentary: Tom Friedman inspires a long rant on (open source) developing nations
In trying to wrangle Tom Friedman, author of The World Is Flat and I have been exchanging emails in (my) hope to have him keynote OSBC San Francisco. (My review of his book is here.)
Unfortunately, he's traveling then (don't ask where - it's a sign of how flat the world really is that I don't even know which planet the city he's visiting is on :-). In his last email, he said something that really hit me, touching as it did on what Nicholas wrote recently:
And how are we going to help those poor people so they are not going to be poor anymore? Through Linux or Bono? Through open source or Live Aid?I had a long train ride today, and I thought about this statement the entire way.
We, the "developed" world, tend to think of poverty, AIDS, etc. as things that a rock star benefit concert can solve. In other words, we believe they're somewhat finite issues: Country A needs $100 billion. Find that money, and all of their problems are solved.
What we do, instead, is fund a small fraction of that money, which does no more good than providing the entire lump sum would. Not to be trite, but it's the old "give a man a fish" cliche. Unfortunately, giving a man Microsoft Office is not the same thing.
Why? Because Office is owned by someone else. It doesn't matter so much that Office is owned by Microsoft - I'm not sure that there is anything necessarily benevolent or malevolent about that particular company.
No, the point is that it's owned by someone else, over there. It's true that in a flattened world, developing economies have greater and greater opportunities to participate in the more advanced, developed economies. And that's a good thing. But the greater benefit seems to be that with open source software, they can own their customers from the beginning. Not as indentured servants through a consulting/off-shoring contract to some BigCo in a developed nation, but rather as owners of the solutions they sell locally.
"But," you respond, "You're an idiot, Matt! With open source, they own NOTHING. Therefore, anything they develop is necessarily communal property, leaving them no better off than before."
Not true. For one thing, not all open source software is licensed under a GPL-type license. Vendors can build IP around open source, if they wish, in a BSD-styled world. Even where the license is the GPL, I've argued elsewhere that the GPL is actually a robust capitalist tool, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the "source of code" argument that I have advanced at OSCON 2004 and elsewhere. (In short, open source companies can charge a premium to the extent that they "own" the development team, even if the code is open. Hence, MySQL can charge a premium for its database, even though other companies could fork its code.)
But most importantly, open source software enables the leveling of IT to match an economy's ability to pay. Nigeria no longer needs to export naira (its currency) to US, European, Ghanian, Japanese, etc. firms. It can build up its IT from the ground up, with advanced open source-based solutions, paying as much or as little as is reasonable for its particular market.
So, the question is not how can these Nigeria-based companies become multi-billion dollar corporations. Instead, it's how can they become multi-billion naira corporations, one naira at a time.
And, in these places, in this context, it really doesn't matter if OpenOffice is as good as Microsoft Office (or insert your open source versus proprietary matchup of choice). That's comparing apples to oranges. It only needs to be good enough to earn naira in Nigeria. (Remember how bad Microsoft Office and WordPerfect were in their first incarnations? OpenOffice is a Rolls Royce compared to the beat-up Ford Pintos those products were....)
Open source, in short, can allow an economy to develop at its own pace, self-contained. Once those local companies have excelled at serving local markets, they're ready to expand internationally.
Just as the US, Europe, Japan, etc. have done.
2 comments:
Good post. Couple of comments. First, you're very right about the balance of payments problem. If you buy technology from outside the country, e.g. Microsoft Windows and Office (even the "new" inexpensive Windows for Thailand), you're shipping hard currency out of your economy to "gain the benefits of modernization".
Second, lets talk about that economy. India would likely rather have a services based economy in its current growth phase, where the wealth is spread around, over a product centric economy where the profits are focused in the hands of a few. Viewing other countries cultures (including their economic cultures) through your own cultural filters is always risky business. Group of 8 nations often seem to forget that point.
I couldn't have put it better myself...
The economic logic of "building a country's IT from the ground up" is undeniable. Open source truly accelerates that kind of growth.
I think the danger with the proprietary I-own-this-and-hold-it-secretly ethos is that developing countries simply do not have the resource or wherewithal to maintain silos. Where silos are maintained, the costs related to the products and\or services tend to be too high to enable widespread development efforts and adoption. This in turn reduces the total value generated by the economy and therefore captured by a closed source company.
I feel that this is a particularly serious problem in Kenya (my home country in Eastern Africa). Technology firms just don't seem to get it. Their obsession with keeping it closed results in much less collaboration than is possible. This in turn limits the potential impact we could have and reduces the speed of penetration of technology. (the mission of my startup, is therefore to enhance this very process of collaboration. I discussed it here).
The current situation is that we have a mass of companies all trying to do similar things (especially in the mobile space). They then go through the whole process of reinventing wheels and finally presenting products which are homogeneus at best, commoditized at worst.
If there is always truly tremendous additional value up the stack, one can only imagine how much value all these companies would create for each other and especially themselves if they open sourced their respective mini-platforms, remixed others and then specialized in more valuable activities in their respective domains of expertise.
Hopefully, all 3rd world entrepreneurs have read your post and will take it to heart. In fact, it should be made mandatory reading in our universities:)
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