Business community advocates free markets. But these free marketers fail to understand the meaning of free in “free markets”. If they had understood the meaning in that case, they would have understood the meaning of free in open source too. Business community, talking about the “cost value” in open source and ignoring the “freedom” aspect of it is shocking. That too, when you find a post advocating something like that in the Wikinomics blog, it makes it doubly shocking. Wikinomics is a book about “collaborative value” in the current day world and how it transforms the business world into a win-win situation for both business community and consumers. The blog associated with the book has a post with the following statement

This got me thinking about open source evangelists. These are the folks (you probably have a few in your organization) that for one reason or another believe that open source is always the way to go – that it’s simply better, no matter what. This is the group that doesn’t understand that open source is simply another licensing model, not a religion.

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Facebook opened itself as a platform for application developers 3+ months back. Many in tech media were too eager to call facebook as an open platform. I was not all that happy about the “openness” of facebook then and I wrote a post in June talking about a decentralized social networking platform. In fact, I mentioned about the walled garden nature of facebook to Robert Scoble in one of his Kyte sessions. He said he is not all that worried about putting data inside the walled garden. But I am happy to learn that he has changed his opinion now and he, along with Marc Canter, Joseph Smarr and Michael Arrington are promoting a bill of rights for users of social web.

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