One of the recurring themes at this year's End User Summit was this whole notion of consumers vs. prosumers of Linux and open source software technology. "Prosumer" is not one of my usual words... I got it from Monday keynote speaker Anthony Williams, one of the authors of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.
The idea of prosumerism is easy enough to grasp: it's when you give back to a product that you happen to be using. It's not quite the opposite of consumerism, since both terms refer to the use of a given thing. Prosumers are definitely someting that open source afficianados can relate to: it's pretty much anyone who gets and gives benefits back to the open source community.
While I was at the conference, one thing I kept hearing from quite a few of the end users there was that while they were very happy to be consumers of Linux, the notion of prosuming Linux was something that they (or their corporate policies) were not too sanguine.
Now, before anyone gets all uppity about this and accuses them of ripping off the open source ideal, let's remember that even the GPL doesn't require users to give back any changes they make to the code, as long as they aren't distributing said software. And, interestingly, the users I spoke with weren't terribly thrilled with the circumstances they found themselves in. Most of them wanted to give back to open source, but found they could not for one simple reason: most modifications they would make to Linux and open source software would possibly reveal a lot about how they do business.
Needless to say, a lot of private companies aren't willing to give up trade secrets to their competitors.
I can dig it.
Still, it would be nice if we could figure out a way to solve this problem and get more of these consumers to become prosumers. The question is, how?
A couple of solutions came up during the course of the conference, both from kernel developers. James Bottomley suggested that end users make an active effort to identify low-level changes that an end user might make to code--the type of changes that would in no way identify business practices. One example I thought of could be a shipping company that uses a special hand scanner to track packages. The driver for that scanner would be a nice contribution to the community, and wouldn't really give any secrets away.
Ted T'so suggested another approach: encourage developers to create benchamarks that would manipulate data in a similiar fashion as the actual code but not reveal detailed data or data process information. This is a potentially time consuming process because it takes a lot of work to "sanitize" a program so it provides a new feature and yet doesn't reveal how that feature is used.
There could be other suggestions out there, and it would be nice to hear them. Prosumerism is a key concept in open source, and efforts need to be undertaken to get consumers of Linux to step over the edge and start giving back.
