Extending the collaborative, open source approach

The Economist:

Can goodwill, aggregated over the internet, produce good medicine? The current approach to drug discovery works up to a point, but it is far from perfect. It is costly to develop medicines and get regulatory approval. The patent system can foreclose new uses or enhancements by outside researchers. And there has to be a consumer willing (or able) to pay for the resulting drugs, in order to justify the cost of drug development. Pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to develop treatments for diseases that particularly afflict the poor, for example, since the people who need such treatments most may not be able to afford them.

It is in this environment that a number of medical biologists, lawyers, entrepreneurs and health-care activists have sought improvements. They have suggested borrowing the “open-source” approach that has proven so successful in another area of technology, namely software development. This is a decentralised form of production in which the underlying programming instructions, or “source code”, for a given piece of software are made freely available. Anyone can look at it, modify it, or improve it, provided they agree to share their modifications under the same terms. Volunteers collaborating in this way over the internet have produced some impressive software: the best-known example is the Linux operating system. So why not apply the open-source model to drug development too? ...

Two big questions remain unanswered as the open-source approach starts to colonise disciplines beyond its home ground of software development. The first is whether open-source methods can genuinely foster innovation. In software, all that has been developed are functional equivalents of proprietary software—operating systems, databases, and so on—that are sometimes slightly better and sometimes glaringly worse than their proprietary counterparts. Their main distinction, from users' point of view, is simply that they are available free of charge. Curiously, this matches the complaint levelled against pharmaceutical companies for developing “me-too” drugs to compete with other firms' most successful product lines—witness the current crop of Viagra imitators—rather than spending their research money in an entirely new area.

The second question is semantic. What does it mean to apply the term “open source” in fields outside software development, which do not use “source code” as a term of art? Depending on the field in question, the analogy with source code may not always be appropriate. It seems the time has come to devise a new, broader term than “open source”, to refer to distributed, internet-based collaboration. Mr Benkler calls it non-proprietary peer-production of information-embedding goods. Surely someone, somewhere can propose something snappier.