Essence of open source
“To me, open source is all about collaborative innovation, that is, working with people all over the world as a community to solve important problems.”He explains how this collaborative innovation is nothing new, that:
"Collaborating with colleagues in your discipline is how you make progress, whether that discipline is physics, medicine, computer sciences or law." and that open source is essentially "a necessary precondition for, collaborative innovation involving software"If we think about the scale of what has been achieved by this collaborative innovation involving software, the shared IT infrastructure, the internet and how it has changed and continues to change so much, its quite staggering.
Irving finishes by concluding that
"These are such important and complex problems, that only through the kind of collaboration made possible by open source software can we hope to attain the needed levels of innovation and progress."I think that this is a useful way to view our work as openenergymonitor. The field that we are working in is sustainable energy which is full of important and complex problems and to paraphrase Irving: it will be through the same open approach in sustainable energy that we can hope to attain the needed levels of innovation and progress required. To engage in discussion regarding this post, please post on our Community Forum.