In the introduction to this week’s Open Source Think Tank, the issue of open source fragmentation was brought to everyone’s attention. Specifically, the term “balkanization” was used to describe this trend, and it was presented as one of open source’s upcoming challenges. Balkanization, as defined by Wikipedia, is a geopolitical term originally used to describe the process of fragmentation or division of a region or state into smaller regions or states that are often hostile or non-cooperative with each other. However, in the context of open source, it describes a recent trend towards decentralization of hosting and tool usage – a prospect that has become increasingly compelling as the maturity, and therefore the technological needs, of projects advance.
This fragmentation, I believe, is not only inevitable: it’s also progressive. The Internet itself is a decentralized medium, and data portability is of great importance to its continued success. People should always use the best tool available for the task at hand, and the tools they’ve chosen in the past should never prevent them from using a different tool today. Choice is good, and in a world where the ability to provide services exists at the personal level instead of the corporate level, it shouldn’t matter where the data is.
I think what concerns me enough to consider this a great challenge for open source is the harm it does to consumers and evaluators. Users who visit a SourceForge.net project and find that several of the linked tools are abandoned or unmaintained are not getting the information they need. In those cases, the transparency of open source has failed the consumer, and that failure is something we could be working to fix. SourceForge.net’s contribution to the community used to be the hosting and tools we provide, but I think our task going forward could also be to enable the freedom to choose while still preserving the order our consumers need.