Open
Source Everywhere
By Thomas Goetz
Wired
Magazine
24 November, 2003
Cholera
is one of those 19th-century ills that, like consumption or gout, at
first seems almost quaint, a malady from an age when people suffered
from maladies. But in the developing world, the disease is still widespread
and can be gruesomely lethal. When cholera strikes an unprepared community,
people get violently sick immediately. On day two, severe dehydration
sets in. By day seven, half of a village might be dead.
Since cholera kills
by driving fluids from the body, the treatment is to pump liquid back
in, as fast as possible. The one proven technology, an intravenous saline
drip, has a few drawbacks. An easy-to-use, computer-regulated IV can
cost $2,000 - far too expensive to deploy against a large outbreak.
Other systems cost as little as 35 cents, but they're too complicated
for unskilled caregivers. The result: People die unnecessarily.
"It's a health
problem, but it's also a design problem," says Timothy Prestero,
a onetime Peace Corps volunteer who cofounded a group called Design
That Matters. Leading a team of MIT engineering students, Prestero,
who has master's degrees in mechanical and oceanographic engineering,
focused on the drip chamber and pinch valve controlling the saline flow
rate.
But the team needed
more medical expertise. So Prestero turned to ThinkCycle, a Web-based
industrial-design project that brings together engineers, designers,
academics, and professionals from a variety of disciplines. Soon, some
physicians and engineers were pitching in - vetting designs and recommending
new paths. Within a few months, Prestero's team had turned the suggestions
into an ingenious solution. Taking inspiration from a tool called a
rotameter used in chemical engineering, the group crafted a new IV system
that's intuitive to use, even for untrained workers. Remarkably, it
costs about $1.25 to manufacture, making it ideal for mass deployment.
Prestero is now in talks with a medical devices company; the new IV
could be in the field a year from now.
ThinkCycle's collaborative
approach is modeled on a method that for more than a decade has been
closely associated with software development: open source. It's called
that because the collaboration is open to all and the source code is
freely shared. Open source harnesses the distributive powers of the
Internet, parcels the work out to thousands, and uses their piecework
to build a better whole - putting informal networks of volunteer coders
in direct competition with big corporations. It works like an ant colony,
where the collective intelligence of the network supersedes any single
contributor.
Open source, of
course, is the magic behind Linux, the operating system that is transforming
the software industry. Linux commands a growing share of the server
market worldwide and even has Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer warning of
its "competitive challenge for us and for our entire industry."
And open source software transcends Linux. Altogether, more than 65,000
collaborative software projects click along at Sourceforge.net, a clearinghouse
for the open source community. The success of Linux alone has stunned
the business world.
But software is
just the beginning. Open source has spread to other disciplines, from
the hard sciences to the liberal arts. Biologists have embraced open
source methods in genomics and informatics, building massive databases
to genetically sequence E. coli, yeast, and other workhorses of lab
research. NASA has adopted open source principles as part of its Mars
mission, calling on volunteer "clickworkers" to identify millions
of craters and help draw a map of the Red Planet. There is open source
publishing: With Bruce Perens, who helped define open source software
in the '90s, Prentice Hall is publishing a series of computer books
open to any use, modification, or redistribution, with readers' improvements
considered for succeeding editions. There are library efforts like Project
Gutenberg, which has already digitized more than 6,000 books, with hundreds
of volunteers typing in, page by page, classics from Shakespeare to
Stendhal; at the same time, a related project, Distributed Proofreading,
deploys legions of copy editors to make sure the Gutenberg texts are
correct. There are open source projects in law and religion. There's
even an open source cookbook.
In 2003, the method
is proving to be as broadly effective - and, yes, as revolutionary -
a means of production as the assembly line was a century ago.
In the Beginning
Message-ID:
[email protected]
From: [email protected]
(Linus Benedict Torvalds)
To: Newsgroups: comp.os.inix
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
Summary: small poll for my new operating system
Hello everybody
out there using minix-I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby,
won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386 (486) AT clones. This
has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like
any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles
it somewhat
Any suggestions
are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-)
Linus
Thousands of coders,
hackers, and developers answered Linus Torvalds' call - and helped him
build a robust system that continues to pick up steam. Yet what's amazing
about Linux isn't its success in the market. The revolution is in the
method, not the result. Open source involves a broad body of collaborators,
typically volunteers, whose every contribution builds on those before.
Just as important, the product of this collaboration is freely available
to all comers. Of course, there are plenty of things that are collaborative
and free but aren't really open source (Amazon.com's book reviews, for
instance). And many projects aren't widely collaborative, or are somewhat
proprietary, yet still in the spirit of open source (such as the music
available from Opsound, an online record label). Not to mention that,
as with any term newly in vogue, open source is often invoked on tenuous
grounds. So think of it as a spectrum or - better still - a rising diagonal
line on a graph, where openness lies on one axis and collaboration on
the other. The higher an effort registers both concepts, the more fully
it can be considered open source.
Of course, for all
its novelty, open source isn't new. Dust off your Isaac Newton and you'll
recognize the same ideals of sharing scientific methods and results
in the late 1600s (dig deeper and you can follow the vein all the way
back to Ptolemy, circa AD 150). Or roll up your sleeves and see the
same ethic in Amish barn raising, a tradition that dates to the early
18th century. Or read its roots, as many have, in the creation of the
Oxford English Dictionary, the 19th-century project where a network
of far-flung etymologists built the world's greatest dictionary by mail.
Or trace its outline in the Human Genome Project, the distributed gene-mapping
effort that began just a year before Torvalds planted the seeds of his
OS.
If the ideas behind
it are so familiar and simple, why has open source only now become such
a powerful force? Two reasons: the rise of the Internet and the excesses
of intellectual property. The Internet is open source's great enabler,
the communications tool that makes massive decentralized projects possible.
Intellectual property, on the other hand, is open source's nemesis:
a legal regime that has become so stifling and restrictive that thousands
of free-thinking programmers, scientists, designers, engineers, and
scholars are desperate to find new ways to create.
We are at a convergent
moment, when a philosophy, a strategy, and a technology have aligned
to unleash great innovation. Open source is powerful because it's an
alternative to the status quo, another way to produce things or solve
problems. And in many cases, it's a better way. Better because current
methods are not fast enough, not ambitious enough, or don't take advantage
of our collective creative potential.
Open source has
flourished in software because programming, for all the romance of guerrilla
geeks and hacker ethics, is a fairly precise discipline; you're only
as good as your code. It's relatively easy to run an open source software
project as a meritocracy, a level playing field that encourages participation.
But those virtues aren't exclusive to software. Coders, it could be
argued, got to open source first only because they were closest to the
tool that made it a feasible means of production: the Internet.
The Internet excels
at facilitating the exchange of large chunks of information, fast. From
distributed computation projects such as SETI@home to file-swapping
systems like Grokster and Kazaa, many efforts have exploited the Internet's
knack for networking. Open source does those one better: It's not only
peer-to-peer sharing - it's P2P production. With open source, you've
got the first real industrial model that stems from the technology itself,
rather than simply incorporating it.
"There's a
reason we love barn raising scenes in movies. They make us feel great.
We think, 'Wow! That would be amazing!'" says Yochai Benkler, a
law professor at Yale studying the economic impact of open source. "But
it doesn't have to be just a romanticized notion of how to live. Now
technology allows it. Technology can unleash tremendous human creativity
and tremendous productivity. This is basically barn raising through
a decentralized communication network."
An Experiment
in Open Source
At 37, Jimmy Wales
has already established his legacy on the Internet. Seven years ago,
Wales, then a futures and options trader on the Chicago Board of Trade,
turned the homepages of hobbyists into Bomis.com, an Internet directory
that lets visitors catalog related sites into webrings. The result unified
the disparate efforts of millions of Internet users. It wasn't open
source, a strategy still percolating in software. But it came close.
Wales wanted something
even closer. Long an admirer of Torvalds and free software pioneer Richard
Stallman, he had a more deliberate experiment in mind: using volunteer
contributors to create an Internet encyclopedia. As in software, perhaps
open source could could turn consumers into producers.
The first attempt
came in 1999 with Nupedia, an encyclopedia project with great ambitions
and what proved to be fatally onerous oversight. Aspiring contributors
had to apply for access; each article was peer-reviewed and professionally
edited. An entry had to make it past seven or eight hurdles before being
posted onto the Nupedia site. "After two years and an amazing amount
of money," Wales shrugs, "we had 12 articles."
So in 2001, he tried
again. Wales and his team eliminated most of Nupedia's barriers to participation
and invented Wikipedia using Wiki, the open source Web-design software.
Wikipedia isn't much to look at. The site resembles cutting-edge Web
design circa 1994. But like a lowly Pontiac Sunfire with a modified
computer chip, most of the action is under the hood. A grassroots encyclopedia,
Wikipedia has amassed more than 150,000 entries, using strict open source
principles: Anybody can write an article, and anybody else can improve
it. Revisions are posted on a Recent Changes page where suggestions
are pored over by a dedicated group of Wikipedians. "There's a
simple way to tell if it's any good," says Wales. "Find an
entry on something you know something about. Odds are it'll hold up
pretty well - you'll probably even learn something new."
So what motivates
Wikipedia contributors? Pretty much the same things behind any open
source project: a dash of altruism, a dose of obsessive compulsiveness,
and a good chunk of egotism. It lets users have a hand not just in shaping
the debate, but in designing the product. Some are genuinely motivated
by the greater good, or find it satisfying to apply their professional
knowledge to a broader audience, pro-bono style. And some get to prove
how smart they are.
Not to say mischief-makers
don't lurk out there. Wikipedia has banned several ne'er-do-wells from
the site, and some areas have been locked down - the front page, for
instance, because, Wales says, "people kept putting giant penis
pictures on there." But in general, the system works surprisingly
well, and the traffic bears that out. This summer, Wikipedia surpassed
Britannica.com in daily hits, according to Web traffic monitor Alexa.com.
Wikipedia's popularity is all the more extraordinary because, like Linux,
it started as a small-scale experiment. But the result challenged Britannica,
a 235-year-old institution.
There's some satisfaction
in the fact that the technology behind Wikipedia is the same one that's
baffled Britannica for years. The old-guard encyclopedia has never figured
out how to adapt to the digital era. In 1998, Britannica stopped updating
its print version and focused on its CD-ROM, then last year revived
the print version. In 1999, it launched a free site online; two years
later, switched to a paid version. The struggles aren't unique, but
they illustrate how a proprietary model built on traditional notions
of intellectual property can be undone by irresistible forces.
Now Wales is thinking
big. He wants to square off with Britannica not just online but in print
and on CD-ROM. Next year, he hopes to release Wikipedia 1.0, a peer-reviewed
and peer-edited compendium of 75,000 entries, available to anyone, for
commercial or noncommercial purposes. He's even considered pulling a
Red Hat - releasing an affordable paid version - before anybody else
does. "Things like textbooks, encyclopedias, dictionaries, reference
works - they lend themselves very well to collaboration," says
Wales. "In fact, that's how they're done in the proprietary context,
too. But it costs Britannica money to pay people to write articles;
it costs to edit them. Those are all things we do for free. So how can
they compete? Our cost model is just better than theirs."
Harnessing the
Means of Innovation
Business gurus have
a term for what drove Wikipedia: innovation! It's a flaccid buzzword
these days, deflated by a decade of leadership seminars and management
bibles. But when you look at what's innovative about open source, think
Tom Paine, not Tom Peters.
Open source embodies
an ethos as fruitful and resilient as the closed capitalism Bill Gates
represents: the spirit of democratic solutions to daunting problems.
It's the creed of Emerson, who preached independent initiative and advocated
a "creative economy." It's the philosophy of William James,
whose pragmatism dictated that "ideals ought to aim at the transformation
of reality." It's the science of Frederick Taylor, who proved that
distributing work could exponentially boost productivity and replace
"suspicious watchfulness" with "mutual confidence."
It's the logic of Adam Smith, whose notion of "enlightened self-interest"
among workers neatly presages the primary motivation for many open source
collaborators.
Finding the roots
of open source in Taylor and Smith is especially significant because
the approach isn't, as some insist, anticommercial or anticorporate.
Rather, it is a return to basic free-market principles. The open source
process fosters competition, creativity, and enterprise. And just as
Taylor and Smith provided the intellectual grounding for the revolution
in mass production, open source offers the mechanism to mass innovation.
While the assembly
line accelerated the pace of production, it also embedded workers more
deeply into the corporate manufacturing machine. Indeed, that was the
big innovation of the 20th-century factory: The machines, rather than
the workers, drove production. With open source, the people are back
in charge. Through distributed collaboration, a multitude of workers
can tackle a problem, all at once. The speed is even greater - but so
is the freedom. It's a cottage industry on Internet time.
Just as the assembly
line served the manufacturing economy, open source serves a knowledge-based
economy. Facilitating intellectual collaboration is open source's great
advantage, but it also makes the method a threat. It's a direct challenge
to old-school R&D: a closed system, where innovations are quickly
patented and tightly guarded. And it's an explicit reaction to the intellectual
property industry, that machine of proprietary creation and idea appropriation
that grew up during the past century and out of control in the past
30 years - now often impeding the same efforts it was designed to protect.
Copyright and patents
have an admirable purpose: They give creators the right to exploit their
creations for a limited time. Then these innovations enter the public
domain. If it made sense that copyrights and patents protected products,
it makes sense that, in today's economy, they protect ideas and concepts,
too.
But the balance
and fair-mindedness that made the American system hum like a well-tuned
Briggs & Stratton is now clogged up with opportunism. Copyright
protections that originally lasted 14 years now drag on for nearly a
century, leaving the public domain a barren ground. Particularly since
the mid-1990s, when the US Patent and Trademark Office began recognizing
business methods, intellectual property has become more than just guarding
what you've made. Trademark, copyright, and patents are now offensive
weapons. The result often impedes, rather than encourages, innovation.
Intellectual property has grown infuriating in its excesses, such as
Netflix's recent patenting of something as simple as a subscription
model for DVD rentals.
Perversely, this
is just how the law wants it. The courts and the patent and trademark
offices exist to protect property, be it physical or intellectual -
slap on "All Rights Reserved" and reap the rewards. But it's
annoyingly difficult to share something - to open intellectual property
to a wide audience. The conventional legal system simply isn't built
to handle "Some Rights Reserved."
Open source flips
this paradigm around. Now there are dozens of licenses, from Stallman's
General Public License to Creative Commons' ShareAlike agreement, that
let open products exist in a proprietary world. Under these licenses,
to use political scientist Steven Weber's terms, property is something
to be distributed rather than protected. The owners are more guardians
than guards.
The first and most
likely places for open source to flourish are at the extremes of IP.
The method can craft better, more open versions of bad business models
and inefficient markets. But the imitative projects, the ones that replicate
proprietary products using better means, are just the gimmes. In the
long term, open source will apply outside IP-dominated industries. Weber
suggests corporate R&D as a natural starting point; the oil industry,
for instance, could enlist outside chemists to collaborate on better
oil refining techniques.
As technology reduces
the costs of replication and distribution to nearly nothing, the open
source approach could catalyze stagnant sectors of the economy - or,
better yet, create new economic sectors. "Open source can propagate
to fill all the nooks and crannies that people want it to fill,"
says Mitch Kapor, who founded Lotus in 1982, cofounded the Electronic
Frontier Foundation in 1990, and now heads the Open Source Applications
Foundation. (See Mitch Kapor Reinvents Your Inbox.) "In an economy
where more and more value is in information - is in the bits, not the
atoms, where bits can be copied essentially for free - any time you
have that situation, economic schemes that rely on existing models of
intellectual property laws for protection are going to do less and less
well. If information wants to be free, then that's true everywhere,
not just in information technology."
Open Source as
a Weapon
A decade ago, Michael
Eisen slogged through swamps in Costa Rica studying the mating behavior
of frogs. That's what biologists did, he figured - and if he had to
fight off a few leeches along the way, so be it. Now he's all about
coding, crafting blocks of genetic data and churning them through his
computer. "It's a great time to be a biologist," says Eisen,
a computational scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
"Origin of Species is the best thing ever written in biology. But
you just wish Darwin knew about genomics."
Yet if biology is
in a renaissance, there are still relics of a medieval age. Most aggravating
to Eisen is the state of scientific publishing. It affronts him. And
he wants to destroy it.
His weapon is open
source. Unlike Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, who didn't set out to take down
Britannica, Eisen has the publishing community squarely in his sights.
Open source, says Eisen, who dabbles in Perl programming, can give rise
to a new distribution model for scientific research.
"The guiding
principle of science has been that freely available material is more
useful; it's more likely to generate better science," Eisen says.
But freely available is not the same as free of charge. Science journals,
with their historically narrow readerships, often charge thousands for
a subscription. One of the biggest disseminators is Elsevier, the science
publishing unit of an Anglo-Dutch media conglomerate, which distributes
some 1,700 academic journals, from Advances in Enzyme Regulation to
Veterinary Parasitology.
"The whole
premise for that model just evaporated with the Internet," Eisen
continues. "Technology now makes openness possible; it's maximum
openness. The rules of the game have changed, but the system has failed
to respond." So Eisen and two colleagues - Stanford biochemist
Pat Brown and Harold E. Varmus, a Nobel laureate in medicine and president
of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York - have devised
an alternative: the Public Library of Science. To Eisen, PLOS is "the
optimal system" for publishing scientific research: Where the old
model limited access to maximize subscription fees, this library is
all about open access - meaning any user can read, download, copy, distribute,
print, search, or link to an article.
Instead of charging
universities thousands to subscribe to PLOS Biology or PLOS Medicine,
as the library's two peer-reviewed journals will be called, PLOS instead
will charge contributing authors a $1,500 fee to cover costs. (Harvard
and other universities typically pay on behalf of their faculties, and
the library will waive the fee in special cases.) In addition to hiring
editorial staffs, PLOS will distribute the work among a pool of fellow
academics. In time, the library will become a storehouse of publicly
available scientific research, a resource that, like Linux, will only
improve with time. And whereas the old model traditionally had scientists
signing away their copyright to the journal, the library will use a
license that leaves copyright with the author but allows for unlimited
use by third parties, provided credit is given to the author.
"The openness
will make the data more useful," says Eisen, pointing to the annual
$57 billion in taxpayer-funded scientific and medical research that
isn't available to the public. And then there's the irony that academic
institutions get charged for work they did in the first place. "How
does it make sense for the universities to give away the copyright to
their research and then pay to get access to it again?"
The library follows
in the steps of efforts such as BioMed Central, a London-based open-access
publisher of online scientific journals. Though BioMed is a valuable
repository of all sorts of research - everything from proteomics to
psychiatry - it has yet to make a significant dent in the major journals'
hold on big research. That's the obstacle PLOS faces, too: convincing
scientists that the new publication will have authority. Publishing
in Science or Nature means your paper matters, and it provides a yardstick
for tenure and promotion decisions. PLOS has already earned credibility
by hiring the former editor in chief of Cell and lining up contributors
from Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and the National Institutes of Health
for the first issues of PLOS Biology, set to debut October 13. The team
hopes such star power will help put any issues of credibility to rest.
And to those who
label PLOS something only a league of anticommercial academics could
dream up, Eisen has a swift retort. "It's the ultimate free market
- the free market of ideas," he says. "We don't prohibit commercial
use, we encourage it. If you want to gather our articles about a particular
topic and sell it as a book, great, go ahead. As far as we're concerned,
that's a good way of getting information out there. The problem with
scientific publishing right now is that it's a monopoly. This is an
attack on a specific business model that is not serving science well."
Building a Hybrid
At any given time,
odds are Monsanto is in court over intellectual property. The agriculture
and biotech giant is suing rival companies for infringing on technology.
It's suing researchers for unlicensed use. And it's suing farmers for
stealing seeds - filing 75 or so lawsuits in the past five years alone,
most notably against Percy Schmeiser, a Canadian cause célèbre
accused of using Monsanto grain without a license; his case goes before
the Canadian Supreme Court in January. This constant litigation is a
necessary cost of doing business; patents, after all, must be protected,
or their value can be lost. But it also reflects a demanding way of
doing business, one that's expensive, time-consuming, and - as the Schmeiser
case attests - not always good for PR.
For a different
approach, consider Cambia, the Center for the Application of Molecular
Biology to International Agriculture, a biotech nonprofit based in Australia.
Founded in 1994 by Richard Jefferson, a mandolinist turned geneticist
from Santa Cruz, California, Cambia has emerged as a force in agriculture
technology over the past decade. The group pioneered research into transgenomics,
where plants are tweaked using their own genetic stock rather than foreign
genes. But Jefferson finds Cambia increasingly hamstrung by the biotech
industry's reliance on patents, cross-license agreements, and trade
secrets. "So much of what we want to do is all tied up in somebody's
intellectual property," he says. "It's a complete sclerotic
mess, where nobody has any freedom of movement. Everything that open
source has been fighting in software is exactly where we find ourselves
now with biotechnology."
So Jefferson tapped
open source methods to skirt the restrictive licenses of companies like
Monsanto. On a broad scale, Cambia built an exhaustive collaborative
database, open to all, of 300,000 patents covering agricultural technologies
- an essential resource for researchers navigating through proprietary
waters. And as a more precise effort, Cambia is developing a gene-transfer
technology that will, Jefferson hopes, work better than the proprietary
methods currently available. The group is following Torvalds' model,
incubating the core technique before turning it over to a network of
users - both nonprofit and corporate - with a liberal licensing arrangement.
"Anybody can tweak it, learn from it, twiddle with it," Jefferson
says. "We want to invent a better way but bind everybody to share
the improvements. Some might call them work-arounds; we call them work-beyonds."
His weapon is open
source. Unlike Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, who didn't set out to take down
Britannica, Eisen has the publishing community squarely in his sights.
Open source, says Eisen, who dabbles in Perl programming, can give rise
to a new distribution model for scientific research.
"The guiding
principle of science has been that freely available material is more
useful; it's more likely to generate better science," Eisen says.
But freely available is not the same as free of charge. Science journals,
with their historically narrow readerships, often charge thousands for
a subscription. One of the biggest disseminators is Elsevier, the science
publishing unit of an Anglo-Dutch media conglomerate, which distributes
some 1,700 academic journals, from Advances in Enzyme Regulation to
Veterinary Parasitology.
"The whole
premise for that model just evaporated with the Internet," Eisen
continues. "Technology now makes openness possible; it's maximum
openness. The rules of the game have changed, but the system has failed
to respond." So Eisen and two colleagues - Stanford biochemist
Pat Brown and Harold E. Varmus, a Nobel laureate in medicine and president
of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York - have devised
an alternative: the Public Library of Science. To Eisen, PLOS is "the
optimal system" for publishing scientific research: Where the old
model limited access to maximize subscription fees, this library is
all about open access - meaning any user can read, download, copy, distribute,
print, search, or link to an article.
Instead of charging
universities thousands to subscribe to PLOS Biology or PLOS Medicine,
as the library's two peer-reviewed journals will be called, PLOS instead
will charge contributing authors a $1,500 fee to cover costs. (Harvard
and other universities typically pay on behalf of their faculties, and
the library will waive the fee in special cases.) In addition to hiring
editorial staffs, PLOS will distribute the work among a pool of fellow
academics. In time, the library will become a storehouse of publicly
available scientific research, a resource that, like Linux, will only
improve with time. And whereas the old model traditionally had scientists
signing away their copyright to the journal, the library will use a
license that leaves copyright with the author but allows for unlimited
use by third parties, provided credit is given to the author.
"The openness
will make the data more useful," says Eisen, pointing to the annual
$57 billion in taxpayer-funded scientific and medical research that
isn't available to the public. And then there's the irony that academic
institutions get charged for work they did in the first place. "How
does it make sense for the universities to give away the copyright to
their research and then pay to get access to it again?"
The library follows
in the steps of efforts such as BioMed Central, a London-based open-access
publisher of online scientific journals. Though BioMed is a valuable
repository of all sorts of research - everything from proteomics to
psychiatry - it has yet to make a significant dent in the major journals'
hold on big research. That's the obstacle PLOS faces, too: convincing
scientists that the new publication will have authority. Publishing
in Science or Nature means your paper matters, and it provides a yardstick
for tenure and promotion decisions. PLOS has already earned credibility
by hiring the former editor in chief of Cell and lining up contributors
from Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and the National Institutes of Health
for the first issues of PLOS Biology, set to debut October 13. The team
hopes such star power will help put any issues of credibility to rest.
And to those who
label PLOS something only a league of anticommercial academics could
dream up, Eisen has a swift retort. "It's the ultimate free market
- the free market of ideas," he says. "We don't prohibit commercial
use, we encourage it. If you want to gather our articles about a particular
topic and sell it as a book, great, go ahead. As far as we're concerned,
that's a good way of getting information out there. The problem with
scientific publishing right now is that it's a monopoly. This is an
attack on a specific business model that is not serving science well."
Building a Hybrid
At any given time,
odds are Monsanto is in court over intellectual property. The agriculture
and biotech giant is suing rival companies for infringing on technology.
It's suing researchers for unlicensed use. And it's suing farmers for
stealing seeds - filing 75 or so lawsuits in the past five years alone,
most notably against Percy Schmeiser, a Canadian cause célèbre
accused of using Monsanto grain without a license; his case goes before
the Canadian Supreme Court in January. This constant litigation is a
necessary cost of doing business; patents, after all, must be protected,
or their value can be lost. But it also reflects a demanding way of
doing business, one that's expensive, time-consuming, and - as the Schmeiser
case attests - not always good for PR.
For a different
approach, consider Cambia, the Center for the Application of Molecular
Biology to International Agriculture, a biotech nonprofit based in Australia.
Founded in 1994 by Richard Jefferson, a mandolinist turned geneticist
from Santa Cruz, California, Cambia has emerged as a force in agriculture
technology over the past decade. The group pioneered research into transgenomics,
where plants are tweaked using their own genetic stock rather than foreign
genes. But Jefferson finds Cambia increasingly hamstrung by the biotech
industry's reliance on patents, cross-license agreements, and trade
secrets. "So much of what we want to do is all tied up in somebody's
intellectual property," he says. "It's a complete sclerotic
mess, where nobody has any freedom of movement. Everything that open
source has been fighting in software is exactly where we find ourselves
now with biotechnology."
So Jefferson tapped
open source methods to skirt the restrictive licenses of companies like
Monsanto. On a broad scale, Cambia built an exhaustive collaborative
database, open to all, of 300,000 patents covering agricultural technologies
- an essential resource for researchers navigating through proprietary
waters. And as a more precise effort, Cambia is developing a gene-transfer
technology that will, Jefferson hopes, work better than the proprietary
methods currently available. The group is following Torvalds' model,
incubating the core technique before turning it over to a network of
users - both nonprofit and corporate - with a liberal licensing arrangement.
"Anybody can tweak it, learn from it, twiddle with it," Jefferson
says. "We want to invent a better way but bind everybody to share
the improvements. Some might call them work-arounds; we call them work-beyonds."