BlogHop

The open Source of development model of today has its roots in the academic computer science of a decade or more ago. What makes Open Source dramatically more successfully today, however, is the rapid dissemination of information made possible by the Internet. When Watson and Crick discovered the double helix, they could reasonably expect the information to travel from Cambridge to Cal tech in a matter of days, or weeks at most. Today the transmission of such information is effectively instantaneous. Open Source has been born into a digital renaissance made possible by the internet, just as modern science was made possible during the Renaissance by the invention of the printing press. The Middle Ages lacked an affordable information infrastructure. Written works had to be copied by hand at great expense, and hence the information had to have an immediate value attached to it. Trade records, banking transactions, diplomatic correspondence; this information  was concise enough and carried enough immediate value to be transmitted. The speculative writings of alchemists, priests, and philosophers- the men who would later be called scientists- took a much lower priority, and hence the information was disseminated much more slowly. The printing press changed all this by dramatically lowering the barriers to entry in the information infrastructure.