by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Valentine’s Day seems a fitting time to celebrate and thank the hardware and software engineers of the world. I use the term Geek with respect. Through your efforts you have worked to bring down the price of IT to virtually nothing.

The chip and process engineers have worked tirelessly to bring down the price of computing through their relentless pursuit of Moore’s Law. Same goes for the communications engineers, who have had to work at an even faster pace. Let’s not forget the hard-drive engineers who also exceeded the speed of Moore’s law to bring us inexpensive data storage (and the iPod).

And a big thanks to the software engineers, especially all of those that have worked to develop a common base of open-source software, and the open-source based software technologies that provide simple, powerful, server-side application development platforms.

For newly formed companies, IT costs are now a fraction of what they used to be. Server hosting and bandwidth costs are a very small budget item. And IT people costs are at least ten times lower than say, five years ago.

And open-source software is only going to get better. If anyone is still on the open-source debate, you are too late. It is over. Open-source, like a slow and steady steamroller is crushing all opponents. If you are a software company and don’t scramble up the stack fast enough, you will be flattened because more open-source software is on the way. With millions of software engineers coming on-line over the next few years in India, China, Poland, Philippines, Ukraine, etc, what will they do with their spare cycles? Some of them will undoubtedly donate their time to open-source projects.

Think of how much value freely available operating systems and applications are already providing humanity as a whole. It really is a global creative commons.

Is there any other such group of people that have made an impact of such potentially long-lasting magnitude? Disaster relief workers, and hundreds of millions of charity volunteers make a huge contribution every day, of course. But such efforts are expensive and not scalable. The Geeks have created and donated software technologies to the world that are free and much more easily scalable—just add more servers (and a couple of admin Geeks…)

It would not surprise me if the open source software movement will one day be recognized as the single most important collective contribution ever made by volunteers towards the world’s common good.

dk0910