Monday, April 24, 2006
Open source part two
When my partners and I ran our election software company, we were obsessively possessive with our code. In order to just look at it, you had to sign an NDA so restrictive that it stipulated that you weren't even permitted to tell anyone that you had seen it. Why? What were we afraid of? Certainly not our main competitors, the half-dozen or so major vendors of election software. Those companies had their own software, developed by competent developers experienced in designing and implementing sofware for the application domain. They wouldn't be making any significant changes to their code based on what they might have learned from ours.
The secret is that we wouldn't want a coupla' guys, especially young guys learning how we did things. They were the real threat and we knew it, because we'd been young guys working out of our basements when we wrote our system and we'd had to learn how to do all the hard parts on our own. We weren't just going to hand all that hard-won knowledge off to some eager beavers who would use it to clean our clocks the way we'd cleaned a few ourselves.
I wonder if the absence of posted source code on the sites of electronic artists represents a possessiveness in that same vein. After all, if another programmer can lift the code that implements the algorithm that spins the graphic image that shifts the frame of the debate that subsumes image and text and reader and programmer, would he or she not be likely to appropriate the currency of my aesthetic and critical influence as well? Making that easier would not be very smart, would it?
# posted by Jim @ 2:50 PM 
