What Open Source Shares With Science

An anonymous reader sends in a philosophical piece at ZDNet about the similarities between open source development and the scientific method. Here's an excerpt: "The speed of progress is greatly enhanced by virtue of the fact the practitioners of Science publish not only results, but methodology, and techniques. In programmatic terms, this is equivalent to both the binary and the source code. This not only helps 'bootstrap' others into the field, to learn from the examples set, but makes it possible for others to verify or refute the results (or techniques) under investigation. In an almost guided-Darwinian evolutionary fashion, this makes the scientific process a powerful tool for the highlighting, analysis and possible culling of ideas and concepts; less useful ideas and hypothesEs die, and likely contenders come sharply into focus. Newton made his famous comment about 'standing on the shoulders of giants,' in part, to indicate that his contributions to human knowledge could not have been achieved solely. He needed the 'firmament' beneath him hypothesized, tested and confirmed by generations of scientists, philosophers and thinkers before him, over centuries."