What is Closed Source?

Open Source from the retro perspective of 2050 What is Closed Source?

We move on to the traces of a long-dead Software-species: Closed Source. An anticipated report from the future about the amazing Code-finds IT to historians and archaeologists by the middle of this century.

Imagine it is the year 2050: IT is historians and archaeologists have found buried on an old machine just now, thirty-year-old Code fragments. The meticulous examination of the sequences you encounter an unknown Software species, with the help of which you must get acquainted: Closed Source.

This is obviously Software not developed as it has for decades, of a global Community, optimized, and shared is backed up, which uses neither a common set of APIs and interfaces, a code base provides, on the can be put on the development of many new applications, without having to start from scratch.

For hundreds of thousands of Software developers around the globe, this just excavated exotic program are line fragments, Messengers from a bygone time. Working in a hermetically sealed isolated, jealously guarded, with teeth, patents, and large attorney’s squad defended the closed Code? That would be for you, neither is an enticing Option a serious Alternative to working in the Open Source environment.

The disadvantages of proprietary Software

Where was the innovation bubbling up constantly from the global cooperation? Quite apart from the fact that it is hardly imaginable to make Software behind closed doors, without the massive Manpower of the Open-Source Community stable and safe.

The Guild of the IT historian will know, however, perhaps never, that the users of this Code-fossils were once forced into a with many limitations connected to the Procrustean bed, back then they called it “Vendor Lock-in”. It’s hard to believe that it has once given to so-called proprietary source code as an Alternative to Open Source.

As you described the Software, which eluded those who had purchased expensive, rights to freedom via the purchase contract. You could check the code, nor change, nor pass, nor any run. That’s not enough, have been covered, the buyer of Closed-Source Software, despite costly Überlizenzierungen you paid as a viable prophylaxis against latent threats of punishment, gritting his teeth, even with the stresses of auditing procedure, a handle for additional claims to be.

Smile and shake of the head

And the antiquity researchers of the IT should meet with a contemporary reports that describe some of the Audit departments of Software vendors as the most profitable Profit Center in the entire company, then you are either baffled or amused by this ice age of IT development and use of ridicule. The Evolution has gone in the meantime, emotionless about the dinosaur Software. Too big, too hungry and too rigid – this is not a recipe for long-term success and has already heralded the end of giant.

* Andrea Wörrlein is the managing Director of VNC in Berlin and Member of the Board of the VNC AG in Zug.

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