Vviewpoints

DOI: 10.1145/1400181.1400189

Historical Reflections
Will the Future of Software
be Open Source?

Tracing the course of influential computing developments and considering possible paths to new paradigms.

IF ONE WAS forecasting the future of software today, it is likely that open source software (OSS) would figure prominently in most projections. Indeed, open source zealots might expect to see OSS everywhere, with “innovation networks” abounding, Microsoft humbled, and Linux on every desktop. Personally, I wouldn’t bet on it.

ILLUSTRATION BY CELIA JOHNSON

Historians are cautious about forecasting the future, with good reason. They know that when technical experts gaze into the crystal ball, they usually extrapolate well but fail to spot those discontinuities that can transform a technology. One such attempt at futurology was the book The Future of Software, published in 1995.^aThe book included contributions from leading experts in the field. They correctly extrapolated that PCs would become more powerful, numerous, pervasive, and software would proliferate to fill the applications vacuum. That was correct to a point, but their collective

a Leebeart, D. Ed., The Future of Software. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995.

take on new software development methods and technologies was wide of the mark. One contributor forecast that visual programming by ordinary users would herald the “fall of software’s aristocracy.” Another predicted the maturing of the software factory, by which our “craft industry” would be transformed “toward Ford-style mass production.” Another contributor expected to see stunning advances in natural language interfaces. What no contributor foresaw, or even mentioned, was the impact of open source

software and development techniques. At the very moment they were making their projections, Linux was under their nose but they could not see it.

The idea of open source software goes back to the very dawn of computing, when the mainframe computer was getting established in the early 1950s. At that time, and for many years after, IBM and the other computer manufacturers gave their software away for free—software was seen largely as a marketing initiative that made their hardware more saleable. Software was supplied in both source and object code form because some people found the source code useful and there was no reason not to let them have it. Where manufacturers’ provision fell short, cooperative user groups, such as IBM’s SHARE, coordinated the writing and free distribution of programs. When it came to applications, computer users wrote their own or hired a “software contractor,” such as the Computer Sciences Corporation or Electronic Data Systems, to write software for them.