Opinion: A quick glance at the provenance of computers, bulletin board systems and the Internet demonstrates that closed systems are always trumped by openness.Once upon a time, the world of computing was ruled by mainframes. These beasts were big, power-hungry, incredibly complicated, often used proprietary operating systems, and were generally locked down to all but the elite few who'd been trained in their care and feeding.
"Computing" was left to the priesthood of pocket-protector-bedecked geeks who had the training, technical expertise and smarts to be able to program the beasts to get them to bend to their wills.
"Normal" people who wanted to be able to use these mainframes had to supplicate themselves to the priesthood of systems administrators, operators, or programmers and could rarely (if ever) actually use the computer directly, instead having to rely on timesharing schemes and batch submissions of their data.
Computers were big, scary and expensive, and they seemed as if they'd never leave the realm of the big corporation or government institution. The market was relatively small.
Then along came the personal computer and the world changed. The first PCs were homebrew affairs, literally soldered together by hobbyists from plans exchanged in homebrew clubs.
Gradually those hobbyists started to see a market for what they were hacking together in their garages and an intrepid few, most notably Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple, and Bill Gates and crew from Microsoft, started to get into the PC business.
The Steves went the route of developing entire systems designed for home users (the early Apple computers) while Gates developed software for the first generations of personal computer from other manufacturers, most notably IBM, who had jumped into the game as the opportunity for home computers became clearer.
The new PCs were designed to be open, accessible and modifiable (to one extent or the other) by people who hadn't spent 15 years learning about engineering. The early Apple computers came with a technical manual that included not only a wiring layout for the motherboard but also a printout of the actual operating system code!
Early generations of IBM PCs were expandable, and as people began to realize that Microsoft's DOS would run on computers of a certain architecture, small companies started producing their own "PC Compatible" systems. Soon companies like Dell arose to take advantage of this growing market.
Personal computers soon were on their way to ubiquity as prices continued to drop and hardware and software became more affordable. The relatively open nature of the PC allowed for whole new industries of third-party add-ons to arise and fortunes were made in the aftermarket.
At the same time, providers of services to hook computers together via phone lines went through a similar evolution. Early "walled-off" services such as America Online and CompuServe gathered a lot of early adopters who were drawn to their ease of use. Users were basically restricted to the system (in a way very much like early mainframe terminal users), but we took what we could get.
Two more "open" technologies—computer bulletin board systems run by hobbyists (for the most part) and the nascent Internet run by the government and some large academic institutions—were also quietly developing behind the scenes and gaining momentum.
Next Page: The Web develops.
Eventually the Web was developed (again as an open, accessible system) on top of the Internet. Gradually users began to migrate away from the closed systems to the Internet, where "information wants to be free" and anything went.
Bulletin board systems eventually died off because of their dialup nature, but their spirit went directly into the Web, where former users were amongst the earliest of adopters. With a free and open Internet where anyone could go anywhere and do anything, services like AOL and Compuserve began to lose users and become irrelevant, a process that continues to this day.
The move away from proprietary systems to the Internet, coupled with the growth and development in personal computers, has lead us to where we are today. The economic benefit of the Internet has been huge and only came about for the same reasons that the PC unseated the mainframe: access, openness, open standards and the ability for "regular people" to tinker.
This tinkering led to the latest explosion in innovation that some are calling Web 2.0, which has produced some pretty cool stuff.
But there are forces at work trying to stem the tide of openness, from PC openness to openness on the Web. There are reports that Microsoft is going to make dual-booting difficult (if not impossible) on Vista because of its disc encryption system. A recently proposed law would outlaw streaming MP3 technologies such as those used by Shoutcast and Live365, and nary a day goes by without another hard-to-use DRM (digital rights management) scheme popping up to make our lives difficult (or cripple our computers—remember Sony?).
There are plenty more examples of why openness and user participation is not only nice to have, but also vital for driving innovation and economic gain. Heck, forget about computers—progress in civilization itself in the fields of science, literature and the arts has always been driven by building on past work and access to past work by everyone. While proprietary access may benefit the group who controls the access in the short term, in the long run it stifles more than it profits.
John Gilmore once said that "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." And it may be just as true that civilization itself bypasses closed systems whenever it can. The new Web that's developing around us is doing so because it's open, not because it's owned by a single, monolithic company.
Companies that keep circling the wagons and locking things down are doomed by history to disappear. Or, at best, they will become irrelevant.
Sean Carton is dean of the School of Design & Media at Philadelphia University and director of research and development at Carton Donofrio Partners.
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