Marketplace Griefing: OSS to disrupt industries

"I just DO things. I'm a wrench in the gears. I HATE plans. Yours, theirs, everyone's ... Schemers trying to control their worlds. I am not a schemer. I show schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are ... I just did what I do best-I took your plan and turned it on itself ... I AM AN AGENT OF CHAOS." -- The Joker

Those that don't know what griefing is haven't played video games before.  Griefing is when you sit in a game and intentionally do / say certain things to tick people off.  If people are trying to play capture the flag, you grab the flag and hide it in a new location.  If there's an objective you ensure that objective can't be met, effectively changing the rules of the engagement to what your goals are (making game of the game).

Enter open source systems (OSS) / new ways of doing business on the web.  I've seen this griefing of industry but haven't fully be able to put my finger on it, mostly because it hasn't come full circle yet.

With that said, if implemented correctly, OSS can be a way of griefing the traditional economies surrounding open source.  The idea is that you create code and contribute and collaborate and then everyone uses that code to sell their services of knowing that system better then others.  Makes sense right?  Companies don't have to buy the code, they buy the people.  Investment in knowledge workers and all that great stuff.

But as these systems mature; let me put forward a darker future of open source.  One in which griefers start putting people out of jobs the way that machinery did during the industrial revolution.  Here are some examples of what I'm talking about:

Classic example: Encarta, Britanica are knowledge bases.  You want knowledge so you buy those products in order to have it.  Wikipedia comes along and says "knowledge should be free".  The concept catches on, people love it, they don't need to buy an encyclopedia that takes up a wall in their house, they just log onto the internet and access knowledge.  That's wonderful isn't it?

Well, what happened to Encarta?  It went away because of market demand and users went elsewhere.  Fantastic, more money for people to spend and less to waste money on everyone needlessly buying the same information. But the problem is that now that industry has collapsed.  Traditional economics, supply and demand is based on market forces and some businesses will live and others will die because consumers are driven from one place to another.  In open source / free economies; what's the "other vendor" that people are driven to?  Well, nothing. The market goes away.

Wikipedia engineers essentially griefed the encyclopedia publishing industry out of existence.  Let's take an example that's starting to play out today.  Moodle is an open source LMS.  Blackboard, Angel (oops no more angel), WebCT (oops no more webCT) and 2 others (oops those just got bought too) companies exist in the closed realm.  There are essentially 4 players in the LMS space right now.  2 open, 2 closed.  If moodle developers give away enough features and refine them enough (make them easier to install w.o. technical knowledge) could they not collapse the entire (closed source) LMS industry?

Don't act like it's so insane.  Remember when Microsoft was THE leader in a lot of industries like desktops, productivity, browsers, CMSs? It wasn't that long ago that they were very popular in mobile circles too.  Firefox, Drupal, Linux, and Open Office have all been in direct competition with these products for some time now.  So in that way, I'm not talking a year from now, I'm talking within the next decade.  We are in a unique position to fundamentally transform the web technology industry.  Yeah, a lot of people will be put out of jobs and forced into continually different skill sets within the industry.

I'm sick of people saying that certain systems and ways of doing business are "just the way things are".  If you want to change things, code them out of the equation.  Take up the good fight, make things increasingly easier for others to do and let's grief closed source coders out of their current jobs.  I shudder when I hear things like C-Sharp, Cold fusion and VBscript because even though they are just languages, they are traditionally used for the development of closed systems.

A phrase that keeps coming to mind is "Have you had enough yet?".  So, have you?