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."

Comments

I disagree that Open Source is like Science

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Are you sure? Because science is done by a handful of "qualified" people working in ivory towers. A cathedral staffed with priests, if you will.

Open Source, though, is more like a bazaar. Wild and eclectic, the bazaar atmosphere takes the best and worst of everything, stirs it together, and produces some of the finest things found anywhere. Everyone has a say and anyone can set up shop.

I'm no millionaire, but I'd say that Open Source is much more like a bazaar than a cathedral.

Re:I disagree that Open Source is like Science

[mpeskett]

Yes, yes, we all know about 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar', but your characterisation of science as a cathedral with priests is way out of line. The same spirit of taking what works and building on it is the foundation of scientific endeavour. There's no "one true way" or revered holy texts of science, only what works. When something is found to not work, it has to be changed or discarded...

You can try belittling qualifications, but getting qualified isn't some sort of indoctrination process (or at least it shouldn't be, granted it might resemble indoctrination in some places, but I submit that those places are turning out bad scientists, however qualified they are). As science advances, the necessary knowledge, experience and learning to make a meaningful contribution only grows, meaning people have to spend those years of study and specialisation, learning about what's gone before, to reach a point in a field where they can do something new.