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Anti-US feelings are boosting the international market for open source software, according to the president and chief executive of Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst - while other commentators prefer to credit national pride in non-US countries.
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Speaking at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, Whitehurst said: "I never thought I would say this but, actually, being very unpopular in the world, as frankly the US is these days, is a huge benefit to open source." In particular, he said, people resent paying billions of dollars in "intellectual property taxes" to giant US companies.
But Mark Taylor, president of the Open Source Consortium, which promotes the use of open source software in the public sector in the UK, said: "I'm reluctant to agree with that statement. In my experience, open source is much more likely to be driven by a positive feeling of pride in one's own country."
Many open source innovations, including Linux, originated within the European region, and open source models make it easier for local software projects to emerge, Taylor said.
He said: "The reality of the IT market for many years is that it has been dominated by handfuls of very large, very American suppliers. Open source helps countries to develop local industry. Rather than being overtly anti-American, countries want to have a little say in their own future."
Open source is seen as a fundamental good outside the US, with countries like Russia and China moving to a model free from US intellectual property laws, said Whitehurst.
Whitehurst also explained Red Hat's business model, saying that payments for support allowed enterprise users to have a version of Linux which they can rely on: "You can sleep at night, knowing that it does not go down."
Speaking at Red Hat's user conference in Nashville back in 2006, Eben Moglen, professor of law at Columbia Law School, said that, far from being communist or anti-business, as some proprietary companies have claimed, the politics of open source go to the roots of what made the US great: the ability for individuals to capitalise on their own innovations.
Moglen said: "The actual politics are very American - they are not scary, but as natural as apple pie. The free-software solution is a return to the traditional result of personal ingenuity. It's freedom to invent, not reinvent - not invent over again something someone else had invented and locked up, but invent in the way that inventing was done in the great spurt of 19th-century inventiveness."
Comments
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1. John H Woods
Even in the UK we think of people from Yorkshire as being different (especially those of us who are from there!) so there's no certainly no reason to believe there is an American national character.
But the sentiments behind open source, including freedom, sharing, and enjoying productive work ... if you had the impossible task of characterising them as matching any single nationality ... I think it would have to be American.
2. Malcolm
I don't think that there is an across-the-board anti-US feeling where Open Source is concerned. I tend to believe that it's more of a reaction to individual corporate attitudes, as epitomised by the likes of Microsoft. After all, Apple is an American corporation and as far as I can see, is not particularly unpopular and also doesn't appear to get so worked up about Open Source.
Even though I use a Mac I use NeoOffice, Thunderbird and Firefox(although I use Safari 3.1, too).
3. Karen Challinor
open source is a global phenomenon, collaborating developers can be physically located on either side of the planet
open source makes no distinction on race, creed, age or gender
talent, skill, experience and enthusiasm are the prime factors driving it's development
businesses could learn a lot from the way open source projects are developed
national pride doesn't enter the equation, open source gets used because it solves the problem at hand and generally doesn't suffer from the "software bloat" that afflicts much of commercial software as the developing companies stuff yet more useless bells and whistles into the application in an attempt to make their product more attractive
open source generally only has features that the users of the software have asked for, or in some cases developed themselves
open source is a good thing, but not for the reasons that Mr Whitehurst is claiming
4. Matt
Maybe people are looking to alternative software solutions that are made by people who can speak English and not American.
5. anonymous
People like Open Source because of the price - everyone knows how much profit MS makes, and object to that, as much - or more - than anything else.
Don't think it matters what country MS is based in; if they made the same profits, they would be just as unpopular...