On Openness

What freedom attracts.

By Jason Pontin

Openness is a virtue. When we like a person, we say, "She has an open face." About a friendly gesture, we remark, "That was openhanded." About ourselves when young, we might sigh, "I was open to new experiences." Openness is attractive.

Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief and Publisher. Credit: Mark Ostow

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Most technologists find openness attractive too. A technical term originally derived from thermodynamics (where it referred to any system that interacted continuously with its environment), openness came to be applied to systems theory, and thence to software, where it initially had a very specific meaning: open computer programs and languages are those that have some combination of portability (that is, they can run within a variety of environments) and interoperability (which means they can exchange data with other software). They must also adhere to open standards, a term that is generally understood to refer to two related ideas: that the software should be free for use, and its source, or underlying, code should in some manner be defined by its community of developers and users. The operating system Linux is the best-known open software.

The Windows operating system, by contrast, is closed, or "proprietary," in the jargon of information technology: it is not portable and possesses limited interoperability. Although elements of Windows adhere to open standards, the program must be licensed, usually for a fee, and its source code has been compiled and hidden from users and developers outside Microsoft. Developers write to application programming interfaces, or APIs, which until last year were mostly closed, and which still Microsoft jealously guards.

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Ever since the emergence of the Web, whose multitudinous pages are themselves created with open standards, information technology has tended to become more and more open. Increasingly, software companies stress their openness. Often, this is mere marketing. Sun Microsystems' Java platform, widely used to create software for devices as different as embedded systems and supercomputers, has been portable and interoperable since it was launched, in 1995, but the heart of its source code was released only in 2007. Some perfectionist companies forswear openness because closed software can be more beautiful, particularly if it is married to hardware, like the Apple Macintosh operating system. But most technologists want their software to be open, because openness attracts innovation.

In this issue, Technology Review's chief correspondent, David Talbot, describes the effort to make online video open (see ­"OurTube"). He writes, "A growing number of technologists and video artists want to see Web video adopt the same openness that fueled the growth of the Web at large. ... A similar transformation of video would not just allow trouble-free playback of any video you might encounter. It would also mean that any innovation, such as a new way to search, would apply to all videos, allowing new technologies to spread more rapidly. And it would make it far easier to mix videos together and create Web links to specific moments in disparate videos, just as if they were words and sentences plucked from disparate online text sources."