Inchoate Curmudgeon

Simon Phipps just posted a blog entry on archaeological chip documentation has some of the most compelling gems I’ve seen indirectly explaining why open source is just plain good business. Basically, closed source is a pesky, long-lived boat anchor on management attention and legal overhead for the companies that manage the intellectual property. This condition persists many, many years after the direct revenue from the property is realized and the capital fully depreciated.

I thought the third category of documentation issue particularly enlightening: “[Documentation] may exist for internal use, but releasing it outside Sun would need legal review to check for ‘trade secrets’ belonging to others. That legal review is time consuming and costs real money.” Reading between the lines, I’ll bet this is an understatement.

Its easy to see how a predisposition toward closed, proprietary solutions would cultivate a culture where this sort of situation is commonplace: what practical difference would the expedient use of third-party proprietary mechanisms make if you can assume you never need to worry about exposing your own dependent or interlocking mechanisms? I can see where this in turn cultivates degenerate and massively complex real-world intellectual property management issues over time, easily in many cases where it was never really worth it to begin with.

Put another way, managing proprietary and closed intellectual property is not as good a deal for the owner as one might think, particularly over the long haul. What good is it to have and own intellectual property if it isn’t financially feasible to transfer, sell or disclose it? In these instances, isn’t managing this estate just a continuing operational drain on the owner?

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