451 CAOS Theory 
A blog for the enterprise open source community
Code sans frontières
Matthew Aslett, July 14, 2008 @ 10:19 am ET“Software should have no nationality, nor even a collection of them,” writes Dana Blankenhorn in his slightly odd post today about the SQO-OSS (Software Quality Observatory for Open Source Software) project.
“Calling software European, as opposed to American or Burmese, sounds like an effort at exclusion. And a claim that your quasi-nationalistic project is the measure of quality strikes me as a way to set oneself apart,” he adds.
I’m not sure what Dana’s so upset about but it seems to me that the European Commission is well within its rights to promote the software industry in its own back yard. SQO-OSS is a European Commission-funded project focused on developing a suite of software quality assessment tools for open source software.
Amongst its goals are “to assist European software developers in improving the quality of their code, and to remove one of the key barriers to entry for open source software by providing scientific proof of its quality.”
As the code produced is open source, as Dana himself notes, the result of the European Commission-funded research and development is available everyone, whether they happen to be European or Asian or African or Australian or North or South American or Antarctican.
Où est le boeuf?
Comments (2) Categories: Software
I kind of see Dana’s point. With all the issues that get in the way of developers collaborating effectively, does nationalism need to be another one of them? Arguably, open source is “balkanizing”, with any given developer preferring to gravitate to one project or another because of technology (Eclipse, Apache, …), language, and so forth, thus limiting their ability to cross-pollinate ideas beyond the scope of individual projects. Proactively labeling a project as distinctly European or Asian or whatever gives people yet another reason for limiting their collaboration.
Of course, national governments have every right to drive domestic IT policies based on open source, but they should be careful not to cut off the power of open source at the knees. That power is inherent in being equally open to innovation no matter where it comes from, and not discriminate based on where it resides. Doesn’t matter whether the “residence” is a corporation or a geographic region, by proactively promoting it, you’re discouraging those outside that residence from contributing.
On the other hand, penguins come from Antarctica, but that hasn’t discouraged Linux contributions from the other six continents, right?
Most open source projects have closed walls to some extent because it isn’t practical to open projects to *everyone* all the time. This is an EC funded project, and the EC’s objective is to improve the competitiveness of the European IT industry. I just wonder if the same complaints would be made if the US government funded an open source research project that involved only US universities and vendors and was focused primarily at encouraging US open source vendors – but which made its results available to everyone. I doubt it.