Having worked with programmers but without total understanding their jobs, I know how revered Linux and other open source platforms are for web development projects and how villified Microsoft systems can be but I haven’t known enough to formulate my own opinion.

I suspect that Verizon’s making its wireless standards open source will not curry this same positive opinion from programmers. As evidenced in this InformationWeek just how meangingful the standards will be is still in question and this was likely a move to stay competitive with Google/Sprint. Another interesting Op-Ed from Technology News points out this has a lot to do with hardware sales, as the popularity of the iPhone has changed everything.

It seems to me this is a major shift for the wireless industry. As Google comes in with an operation system, Android, that could revolutionize how people interact with their phones and with the iPhone, telecom companies might be better off focusing on how to get the most people sign up for their services(and keeping those customers!) rather than how their R&D will come up with the next big thing — gadget or functionality — that will win some market share in the short term. Maybe, even, cell phone service would become more robust and more economical as this becomes the primary differentiator or competitive advantage to be had.

Shifting back to the web, the idea of buying hardware (my pc) from my DSL provider seems absurd. I doubt innovations would have happened so fast in either hardware or web programming if we left so much control in the hands of a few telecom companies. Maybe now we’ll see wireless innovation at a pace exponentially faster than before.

Another Information Week article points out how to best incorporate Open Source into development and systems projects. Much of the insight in the article into how to best use open source presumably explains why programmers love it so much: it depends on feedback from the programmers themselves, its community-oriented (for instance, I know that some of the programmers at my last job submitted projects they built on wordpress, an open source platform, into contests for the coolest derivate from the original code) and its flexible.