I choked a bit reading Matt Asay’s Tim O’Reilly: Open-source purists trying to answer the wrong question this morning. And I quote:

Of the formative figures in open source, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Eric Raymond loom large. Arguably, however, few have had as much of a disruptive force as Tim O’Reilly, who has helped to create the open-source market and has spent the last six years reshaping it with his seminal “Open Source Paradigm Shift” and other articles.

Now, I know Tim O’Reilly has some pretty strong contributions to OpenSource. And I also know that RMS isn’t exactly the most popular kid on the block in terms of commercial OpenSource. But to say Tim O’Reilly’s contributions are more disruptive than Stallman’s? Torvalds? Seriously, in what context?

After thinking a while, I spotted a pattern in Asay’s claim with others made in the past. Gottlieb Daimler was the dude who invented the automobile. Yet, Henry Ford is far more well-known than Daimler for bringing cars to the masses via the production assembly line. Electricity, while never being “invented”, was studied since the 17th century, yet Edison gets most of the glory for his efforts harnessing the electricity for the masses.

Not to take away anything from O’Reilly, Edison and Ford, but this really stinks of the “what have you done for me lately?” syndrome. Cars are still being used now, so yeah, we appreciate Mr Ford for all he’s done for us. But come 2 decades later and we’re all zipping around on Segways sans wheels, would we still remember him?

Back to OpenSource: O’Reilly cannot be compared to RMS. Or Torvalds. Fine, he’s about on par with ESR in my book. What O’Reilly wrote about reflected what was happening in the real world and where it was headed to. He did not write a roadmap for the evolution of OpenSource in general. To attribute the progress of OpenSource in general to the written journals of an observer like he was the Oracle is simply belittling the entire process. It’s like (dare I say it?) some religious nut claiming that the world and its magical complexity came about just from the “design” of an individual deity.

We all ride on the shoulders of others. Even RMS, Torvalds and other OpenSource luminaries. Before drafting the GPL, RMS was already happily coding the same way he always liked in the academic software community, until the hardware vendors decided that software was more valuable than the pieces of plastic and lead it was driving. I hesitate to compare the contributions of RMS and his predecessors as one could not have happened without the other. The same applies to O’Reilly.

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