Shared data for Leadership and impact from research
Thursday April 6, 10:30AM (Stockholm) via Zoom

Discussion on the topic “Open source – the enigma for impact in society and research”

Chairs:
Mikael Syväjärvi, Alminica AB; Research & Innovation Coordinator – Institute of Advanced Materials
Yassin Yomni, Zinnova AB; Head of Advanced Digital Technologies – Institute of AI & Robotics

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Message from Yassin Jomni, Zinnova AB; Head of Advanced Digital Technologies at Institute of AI and Robotics.

Open innovation is a movement to resist the traditional corporate research labs mentality of secrecy. It promotes an open information age mindset. This movement could be traced as far back as the 60s and has been endorsed over the years by a growing number of academics, politicians and business leaders.

The idea behind open innovation is that corporations can (and should use) both external and internal innovations alike. Innovation tends to occur at universities, startups or by individuals. Therefor firms can not only rely on internal innovation and should instead buy or license (i.e. patents) processes and inventions from other companies. Following the same philosophy, internal innovation not being used by the firm should be outsourced to other firms by licensing (i.e patents), through joint ventures or spin-offs.

Open source is another movement that can be traced as far back as the 50s with IBM sharing the source code of its operating systems to boost the computer industry still at it’s infancy. The philosophy of the open source movement is a decentralized software development model where source code is made freely available to anybody for modification and redistribution. This movement later inspired the creation of other similar decentralized models such as open hardware (RISC-V is one good example), the maker movement, and finally open data.

Open source has gained traction in the past two decades and is used today in most commercially developed software and innovation. From Git and different compilers to Linux and higher end libraries such as OpenCV. Although open source and other open decentralized models share some similarities with open innovation, they differ on a fundamental key issue: Intellectual Property (IP).

The open source movement gives away the IP in order to make the source code freely available to anybody to use, modify and redistribute at will. Open innovation relies heavily on patents and licensing schemes to monetize on the IP and share innovation.

This interdependence is unfortunately asymmetric in favor of corporations as they use freely available open source software to develop and monetize on commercial products and innovation. Open source is an integral, and in some cases most important part of the value chain. But it generally does not benefit from the commercial revenues to the extent given of its role. Android OS is a good example where the open source ‘Linux kernel’ powers all Android devices. But thousands of volunteer developers contributing to the ‘Linux kernel’ around the world do not benefit from Googles commercial revenues even though they have a contribution in the value chain.

This is also a problem for some companies relying on open source software. There the companies expect bugs to get fixed and features to be developed on time. The companies are relying on volunteer open source developers outside their own control.

There are some technologies such as blockchain and NFTs that could be applied to make these new, open and decentralized models fair and equitable.

Ultimately this highlights a democratic issue. It should spark a debate about the value of work and how do we define it as technological innovation is moving at a faster pace than our social norms. The traditional definition of work is challenged by technology and the emergence of a more efficient, free, open and distributed way of doing things. We should embrace change and openness to make the necessary societal changes to fully support this new paradigm shift in the meaningfulness and value of work.