Every which way at once

RECENTLY, A NUMBER of significant announcements regarding open-source software on the corporate desktop have been made. OpenOffice, birthed from the code of Sun’s StarOffice product, is nearing its Version 1.0 release. CodeWeavers says that its CrossOver Office product will allow you to run versions of Microsoft Office on your Linux desktop. And Lindows, a company dedicated to producing a Windows-less desktop solution, is battling with Microsoft in the courts over the Lindows name.

This has brought about a number of reactions. Some question whether any office product, including OpenOffice, can supplant Microsoft Office. Others question the wisdom of enabling Microsoft Office to run on Linux. But the underlying current beneath objections seems to be, “Can the open-source community afford to spend time and resources pursuing these avenues?”

As I mentioned in my column a few weeks ago (” Get Mono from .Net? “), the open-source world is dedicated to freedom. As such, it is not inconsistent for developers to give you the choice to use current Windows programs under Linux, or to give you open-source equivalents to the products you currently use. But there is another factor at work here.

In the commercial world, a corporation generally has a single mission that manifests itself in a focused business direction (well, for nondot-com corporations anyway). When faced with multiple possible directions, most corporations carefully pick one and pursue it. As a result, the open-source community’s pursuit of multiple, simultaneous directions sometimes seems dangerous and irrational to people steeped in standard corporate thinking.

The key to remember, though, is that the open-source community is not bound by the same rules as businesses. Whereas individual companies, such as CodeWeavers, may need to pick a single direction in order to be successful, the community on the whole does not.

In the open-source community, there is no need to focus on profitability. The community does not live and die on revenues, so there is no need to eliminate solutions that might be useful but unprofitable. The greater issue is the need for the solution to exist. If there is a need, and some programmers willing to address it, you are likely to see a solution given sufficient time.

I can hear someone say, “But won’t this stretch the community too far? If IBM or Microsoft can’t afford to have such a wide variety of solutions, how can the open-source world do it?”

The answer is simple. The community is bigger than the tech staff of any company on the planet — and it is growing daily. And considering how much untapped talent from places such as China and Africa will come online in the years ahead, the open-source talent pool should grow precipitously.

So it is possible and reasonable to develop multiple solutions to the same problem. You just need the right paradigm to facilitate it. And open source fits the bill perfectly.