DIY-IT and Open Source

As some (hopefully most) of you know by now, we've started a new publishing project on the Web, devoted to the subject of DIY-IT, or Do-It-Yourself IT. It's called Doc Searls' IT Garage (or, more simply and modestly, IT Garage). It's at garage.docsearls.com, and it's a new sister (though it feels more like a brother) of Linux Journal.

As I explained in an open letter to readers <http://garage.docsearls.com/node/view/9> when IT Garage went up in April, this thing isn't about me, any more than, say, Forbes magazine is about Malcolm Forbes (or any of his namesakes). It's about what resourceful IT professionals do for themselves, with our without the help of vendors.

Although my byline appears above the majority of posts there, it's not about me or anything I might have to say. Its long-term purpose is to provide a place where anybody with an interest in DIY-IT can write about anything related to the subject -- outside the gravity well of mainstream media interest in vendor sports and other distractions from What's Really Going On. If you have thinking to share, stories to tell, or news to pass along, please come on over and start posting. We need you.

Meanwhile, I'll use this space to address a question a number of people have asked: How does DIY differ from open source?

First, open source is a kind of software while DIY is a kind of activity. So in that respect, the difference is of the apple/orange variety. But there are similarities. Both open source and DIY work as adjectives. Modifiers. While "open source" serves as an adjective modifying "software", DIY serves mostly as an adjective modifying "construction" or related activities such as "home improvement". DIY-IT borrows the DIY modifier to create new IT category. In that respect -- open source and DIY are both categories of a larger subject -- they are similar.

Open source, however, is far more formalized than DIY. The Open Source Initiative <http://opensource.org> offers a ten-point Open Source Definition, plus a Certification Mark and Program that has blessed fifty different licenses, so far. DIY-IT, on the other hand, is mostly about techies getting stuff done. To DIY-IT, Linux and other open source products are handy building materials. Primary interests are utilitarian.

In other words, the two are very different yet highly related subjects. And that's where the confusion comes in. Because without open source there would be no DIY-IT. And without having crossed some kind of threshold, we wouldn't be so ready to start talking about DIY-IT today. Rather than, say, a year ago.

For some perspective, here's what the index page of the Open Source Initiative says about its agenda for the "commercial world" of IT:

The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.

We in the open source community have learned that this rapid evolutionary process produces better software than the traditional closed model, in which only a very few programmers can see the source and everybody else must blindly use an opaque block of bits.

Open Source Initiative exists to make this case to the commercial world.

Open source software is an idea whose time has finally come. For twenty years it has been building momentum in the technical cultures that built the Internet and the World Wide Web. Now it's breaking out into the commercial world, and that's changing all the rules. Are you ready?

There are still large (and, in one gigantic case, deep) pockets of resistance; but the mission has clearly been accomplished. Once a radical notion, open source is now standard. Not long ago, an "industry standard platform" meant Windows. Now it's just as likely to mean Linux or the LAMP suite.

Microsoft may be the biggest software company in the world; but the second-biggest one, Oracle (also the top database company), has standardized on Linux as its preferred deployment platform. SAP, Peoplesoft, and a raft of other Big Players are offering more Linux support every day.

Still, the big vendors are also ratifying a decision already made by the do-it-yourself folks among their IT customers and inside their own companies. They're doing the smart thing, true; but they also don't have much choice about it.

The key is modularity. Freedom. And choice. DIY-IT folks may not have all they want of those virtues, but they're getting more of them, every day. Whether Powers That Be (or were) like it or not.