#OpenReformJo - Part 1: Reforming the IT Community

#ReformJo captivated the Jordanian blogosphere, and led everyone to question where they stand from it, their level of involvement, and their role in this reform. As an openness advocacy group, Jordan Open Source Association weren't any different and here Mohammad Tarakiyee presents a view on how the openness paradigm can be applied to #reformjo. 

Open Source is about more than just the software, and while this article will cover just that, I’ll be following this up with articles about open governance, content, journalism, research, standards and ethics.

I've often had problems explaining to people why I chose to advocate for open source software, because for me, my belief in open source goes beyond what software looks better, or what is more prevalent, or what some big company CEO said. Open Source for me is a matter of a way of life, and I found myself having to write this article to explain why.

Software is often seen as a commodity, like a car.  Manufacturers make different cars, guard their secrets closely, and try to sell as many cars as possible. Surely, that’s more profitable, but it can stand in the way of innovation in the car world, and it gives manufacturers an unruly grip on what the customers eventually get. A car manufacturer can choose to hold back a particular innovation a couple of years simply because they want to cash in more on a certain patent. 

Cooking recipes on the other hand, aren’t seen in the same light as technology patents. They are commonly exchanged between people, improved upon, and redistributed. Back in the day where communities were smaller, people constantly shared recipes with each other. One might argue that with the advent of mass publishing, people started packing recipes together and selling them to people, or that some prefer to keep their recipes secret. 

But then again, that changed with the Internet. People now can share all the recipes they want, improve on them, and publish them again back on the Internet. The Internet must have brought the days of cookery books to a gruesome end. Yet, that is not true. Cookery books these days are just as popular as before, and numbers indicate that they might be even a little more popular than before the Internet. 

For me, recipes are perfectly analogous to software, rather than viewing it as a pure commodity. The Internet, itself built on open standards compiled by the community of researchers, was a game changer, allowing open and free software to be able to compete with proprietary software. Despite the fact that both kinds of software exist, and will continue to do so for a period of time, the importance of open software lies in the fact that we can’t afford not to have it. Openness in software fosters innovation and prosperity, levels the field for newcomers in a domain that is growing exponentially, and enables people to collaborate, accumulating the efforts of millions rather then aggregating them. 

It doesn’t make much sense from a purely proprietary or commercial point of view, and the debate rages on, which is why I call it a philosophy, or a way of life, because you have to believe in the benefits to be a functional member of the open source software community. 

Why did I say a functional member? 

Modernization in Jordan, and the lack of natural resources, has changed us from a society of primarily producers into a society of consumers. However, when it comes to open source software, we are no different. I’ve personally observed that the penetration of open source software in the technological community is not that bad. Many companies use open source platforms to develop software, and outside of universities, most of the IT community knows what open source is. 

Compare that to Jordan’s contribution to the open source community? Almost negligible, and there-in lies one of the many problems we seriously need to reform. While we’re a small country, and therefore can afford to leech off the big open source community without giving anything back, we can hugely benefit from participating in the Open Source community. By subscribing to the open source ideology where people decision to help depends on more than return on investment, we can attract big names willing to invest in the region. The country across the river grasped that concept, so it is not surprising that they’ve managed to attract so many big companies. 

On another level, our IT eco-system is not sustainable as it stands. Most of the companies in Jordan are trying so hard to compete on a local and a regional level that it has become impossible for them to even consider competing on an international level. Innovation is also lacking, as we take pride in recreating or appropriating software and business models that we’ve imported as is from the countries leading in software. Most unfortunate however, is that everybody is trying to get rich off IT. Our IT infrastructure, rather than becoming a support system for the country, is becoming a burden on our already debt-burdened country. 

If you asked me how we could reform the IT community in Jordan, I would ask it to embrace openness. We need to stop competing on a local level, and start collaborating, locally, regionally, and internationally, to create IT recipes that are cheap and scalable to our country’s economy, and those that answer specific needs to third world resource-deficient countries like ours.

This will require adapting our business models, some of our legislation, and a commitment on an individual, and government policy level. Perhaps nobody would get terribly rich while following an open source policy (Google being a notable exception), but I believe I’ve presented enough towards the argument that open source can reform Jordan’s IT community into one that is sustainable, and empowering, and that will definitely raise the standard of living in Jordan as a whole.