Peer review and public acessibility makes Open Source superior

The role of copyright is to ensure that an inferior work is not sold under the name of a superior engineer.

If works are published and available for peer review, then the dishonest or inadequate designer has lost the shield of obscurity: he or she can't hide someone else's work inside an impenetrable "black box".

As in other engineering disciplines, publication would increase the chance that second-rate work - or dishonestly-presented work - is discovered. This is an important consideration in a world where software has become embedded in our social infrastructure. If software is as important as a building, then it should be accorded similar scrutiny.

Damage to Australian Industry

A widespread adoption of Open Source software would reduce the cost of inputs to the Australian software industry, without eliminating the value of skills in large projects.

"Shrinkwrap" software vendors could suffer, certainly: the software individuals buy at retail is the sector of the industry most associated with the Microsoft "ecosystem". Even then, however, I'm not certain of the impact, because I think for most people, convenience remains important. It's easier to install software from a CD than to find, assess and download it over the Internet.

Other sectors of the Australian industry would unequivocally benefit: those companies, for example, whose business is in what's known as "embedded systems" would cut their cost of inputs in an Open Source world.

Embedded systems developers here and overseas already use Open Source software because it improves rather than diminishes their profitability. You'll find Open Source operating systems in laser printers, photocopiers, network firewalls and very soon in mobile phones. Outside the consumer field, a great many telecommunications switches, defence systems, scientific computers, and industrial control systems likewise use Open Source operating systems as the basis of their software development.

Bugs

Healy argues that Open Source software has high bug counts (all software has high bug counts); clumsy operation (again, common to all software); and unfinished functionality (ditto).

This is not intrinsic to Open Source software, it's intrinsic to all software.

The main reason is the relative youth of the software industry. It's still subject to faddism and many individuals still resist the boring disciplines of engineering (such as rigorous education, repeatable experimentation, and professional certification).

The "copying of components" Healy decries is a good example.

"With software though, once the source code is made available, freeloaders can take that source code and build similar programs without doing all the development work," Healy writes.