I’ve been really busy at work lately, feverishly working on a year-long project that is being shoe-horned into the last few weeks of my employment. We’re working with a design firm to design the interactions and visuals of the site, and I’m building it. Ugh.

One of the things the designers frequently bring up is “open source”. “There’s an open source package that does that, so it should be easy…” is often the predicate to their argument. Open source also came up during my interview with eyebeam yesterday. The director described the lab and process there as “open source”–they like to distribute information openly and freely. Sounds good!

While I agree with many of the philosophies of open source (but not the elitism), I am now starting to shudder when I hear the term. First, the designers just don’t understand how software works. They specify many rich (i.e. AJAX, confirm dialogs, visually rich UI, etc.) interactions–open source packages are usually ugly. Usually. One can *easily* spend as much time required to rewrite a piece of functionality, integrating and modifying an open source package to do the same task up to specification. Open source does not mean something’s been “done”. Open source packages are more like software libraries than finished projects–they provide handy routines/modules, but aren’t usually finished in and of themselves. Unless you are okay with the usually conservative, sometimes useless default UIs and settings they “ship” with.

Hearing the words “open source” from eyebeam made my eyes roll because it’s now also become a synonym for freely, publicly disseminated anything. And I’m not really arguing with that part of it, nor the philosophy behind it. But eyebeam doesn’t open source everything they make, as promised. Take their WaveBubble project (essentially a cellular phone jammer) for instance (here or here). I know it’s illegal, but I want to build one. Lady Ada (the author) says the project will “never be available as a kit due to FCC regulations”. Okay. But I still want to build one. Schematic, please? How about a parts list? I’m pretty technically savvy (not with electronics, granted), but I can’t get the information.

Like most “open source” projects, maybe I’m not in the “committer’s club”, but I ask, “does anybody have the ‘open source’?”