It's that time again when pundits are assembling their top ten lists of the previous year and holding forth with bold new predictions for the coming year (and only rarely bothering to tie last year's predictions with this year's top ten). This holds true at the venerable Economist magazine as well, apparently, where the Science and Technology "Tech.View" delivers "Three Fearless Predictions" for 2008; among these is the proposition that "Surfing-and everything else computer-related-will open."

The author credits Ubuntu Linux, of all things, with opening people's eyes to Linux in the wake of SCO's failed lawsuit, and thence leading them unto the church of open standards.

There are a number of questionable propositions involved in that; one, that the SCO lawsuit was actually restraining anyone from adopting Linux; two, that using Linux somehow leads one to embrace openness; and three, that this is mostly down to Ubuntu.

I think Ubuntu is swell and I am sure that it is driving Linux adoption on the desktop mightily, but I very much doubt that it is creating the sort of open-source groundswell that many Linux proponents desire among the masses. Instead, to some extent it is penetrating the previously closed market of casual users who now have a reasonable Linux-based alternative to run on low-end PCs, but I don't see any significant evidence that it is making them any more curious about what was under the hood than they were before, or any more militant about what is running on servers they will never see in a data center half the country away.

When you get right down to it, what the article is really talking about as the driver for an open-source transition is costs; but as any OSS advocate will tell you, free as in speech is substantially different from free as in beer, and OSS is more about the speech than the beer. The financial factors that the Economist cites are nothing new and have never been the deciding factor in most purchases (or else you'd all be running Linux and not much else by now).

I don't think that openness is going away, and I don't question the value proposition that it represents in many venues (I use, and push, such solutions myself). But the economics of it are not so simplistic as the Economist portrays them and while I'm sure that Microsoft and other traditional closed-source firms will purport to embrace open-source, it doesn't change their basic entrenchment against it, and it's going to be a lot further in the future than 2008 that we really see everything open up, if ever.