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Jul 3 2008 10:00AM EDT

What Hath Open Source Wrought?

Blaise Zerega prefers bazaars to cathedrals.  Five years ago this month, economist Brad DeLong asked a question central to the value of information technology. If the industrial age yielded the assembly line, what, he pondered, will the information age yield? "From a historical perspective," wrote DeLong in a Wired magazine column, "it's not at all surprising that we are thrashing about, still trying to figure out how to use these new tools most effectively." By tools, he was referring to computers, software, and of course, the web. The answer, he hinted, was to be found in open source software.

Fast forward to the present. It's obvious to anyone who has paid attention not just to advances like open source software, but to crowd-sourcing and to the importance of user-generated-mass-production. While we still have some thrashing about to do, it's going to be a glorious thrashing about.

And you know a development is real when McKinsey gets involved. In June, the firm published The Next Step In Open Innovation (free registration required). The authors cite such examples as LEGO, the LAMP stack, and the design of the ATLAS particle detector. It's definitely worth a read this holiday weekend.

Oh, and the report offers up an answer to DeLong's thorny question: the authors dub the phenomenon he described as distributed co-creation. Gotta love it.

For more on DeLong, read about Felix Salmon's lunch envy.

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