Founding fathers, open source & willy wonka / Radio Hong Kong 3
Lots bubbling out there and in my regular catch up with Phil Whelan of Hong Kong Radio 3 we took a look at some of the stories catching his eye and some of the stuff I’m speaking about and working on.
This week we marked the sad and untimely passing of Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s Chief Executive, who died on Saturday at the age of 55 and asked whether he was part of the founding father group that shifted game playing off our television and large fixed screens into handheld consoles and then into our mobile phones heralding a new era in video gaming. He was also responsible for normalising gaming taking it out of just being for gamers and instead made it something that many people do in between doing other things.
We also took a look at another almost overlooked event and marked the anniversary of the open source revolution which began today in 1992. This hippy start-up rebelled against the large corporates that demanded we buy their costly, bloated and flawed mainstream software and instead insisted that those that right the code have the right to share that code at no cost. This revolution led to Linux and many many others and to me is the precursor of today’s smart phone apps and the general approach to software today of low or no cost, constant updates and alternate revenue models.
We then turned our attention to an earlier piece on I did on some other media interviews this week the Willy Wonka elevator which Phil thought in a congested city like Hong Kong may offer some new building possibilities.
As always a fun chat, lots of topics, opinions and laughs, so have a listen now (8 mins 23 secs).
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What does the open source software movement reveal about how knowledge creation actually works?
The open source software movement is one of the most significant economic and organisational experiments of the past 50 years, and its lessons extend well beyond software: it has demonstrated that collaborative development by distributed contributors with diverse motivations (commercial interest, reputation, learning, ideology, community) can produce software infrastructure of extraordinary quality and reliability — Linux, Apache, Python, and thousands of other projects that underpin most of the world’s digital infrastructure were built this way; it has shown that transparency and peer review at scale can be more effective at identifying and correcting errors than proprietary closed development; and it has created an economic model where the value in a software ecosystem migrates from the code itself (which is free) to the services, customisation, support, and integration around it — a model that continues to reshape software industry economics.
Q: How do the principles of open source development apply beyond software?
The principles that make open source software development productive — transparent contribution, meritocratic peer review, modular architecture, permissive licensing, and community governance — have been applied in multiple non-software domains with instructive results: Wikipedia applied open contribution with editorial governance to encyclopedic knowledge with results that surprised established publishers; open science initiatives applying pre-registration and open data sharing have accelerated research reproducibility and reduced publication bias; open hardware projects have demonstrated that transparent design can enable rapid innovation in physical products; and the broader ‘open innovation’ concept in corporate R&D has been applied with mixed results — the organisations that extract most value are those that genuinely participate as contributors rather than simply consuming the outputs of others’ open work.
Q: What does open source reveal about the economics of knowledge and its relationship to power?
Open source software raises fundamental questions about knowledge economics and power: the traditional intellectual property model assumes that knowledge creators need exclusive control and rent-seeking opportunity to be motivated to create — open source demonstrates that this assumption is empirically false for a significant category of knowledge creation; the political economy of knowledge — who controls it, who can access it, who benefits from it — is directly at stake in open source licensing and governance disputes; and the concentrated ownership of AI foundation models (most of the most capable AI systems are proprietary) contrasts with the open source tradition that built the internet infrastructure they run on, creating an important ongoing tension about whether the most consequential digital infrastructure of the AI era will be open or controlled. The ‘founding fathers’ framing is apt — the decisions made now about AI openness will have long-term structural consequences.
Q: How can I book Morris Misel for a technology and society, innovation models, or digital economy keynote?
Contact the booking team at morrismisel.com/event-organisers.
Lots bubbling out there and in my regular catch up with Phil Whelan of Hong Kong Radio 3 we took a look at some of the stories catching his eye and some of the stuff I’m speaking about and working on. This week we marked the sad and untimely passing of Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s Ch.
When signals like Founding fathers, open source & willy wonka / Radio emerge, organisations that engage early have the advantage of choosing their response rather than reacting to events. That gap between those who prepared and those who did not is where competitive positioning is actually made or lost.
The most important question is not whether Founding fathers, open source & willy wonka / Radio will matter, but how quickly it will matter in your specific context. Leaders benefit most from mapping the ripple effects early — not just the direct impact but the second and third-order consequences that arrive later and hit harder. That is the practical work of foresight.
