I was perusing the program for a local “green” event, when I noticed a full page advertisement for Firefox, saying that it’s software was “100% organic.” I kind of chuckled. I thought, what does that really mean?
For Firefox, it means, “open source, community-powered.” And I realized that they had an interesting point. In my mind, it harks back to the arguments that Yochai Benkler made in his book “The Wealth of Networks,” that a ecosystem full of open source, community-powered software was, in a sense, more sustainable, and promoted more, not less innovation than the proprietary software ecosystem.
So now I think I agree with the Mozilla Foundation that a good metaphor for open source as any is that it is to software what “organic” and probably “fair trade” is to food. Too bad the metaphor doesn’t go both ways, because then organic and fair trade food would be free, too.
And, like both of those labels are complex and not entirely easy to nail down with food, so it is with software. But I think it works.
