NoSQL - Open source equals more innovation?

As I have moved my team to using more NoSQL data stores, I found an interesting side topic to the SQL vs. NoSQL issues. The vast majority of NoSQL technology is open source. Open source has been around for a while. Started in 1985 by the Free Software Foundation and now fostered by the Open Source Initiative.

But we can look at the roots of the concept going back to the Founding Fathers with the creation of the U.S. Patent system, which may seem to be an anathema to our current views of open source. At that point, the U.S. government wanted to spur technical innovation, by allowing inventors to share their inventions and in return have the ability to license their shared inventions for a limited time (20 years which is forever in software time frames). After that time, the invention then enters the public domain. The alternative to a patent was to keep the invention secret, and not share it at all. This is what Coca-cola did, and it is generally called a trade secret.

So it is interesting, that recently patents have now taken on the light of inhibiting innovation. NoSQL has been the most significant innovation in data technology and almost all the main players are open source: MongoDB, Couchbase, CouchDB, Cassandra, Redis, Elasticsearch, Lucene, Hadoop... Here is one list from last year.

So what is it that makes open source drive innovation? I found in my entry into the world quite intriguing. I jumped on the forums to learn about how the new software I was testing. Soon I found I was poking around GitHub to understand how the software works. I noted that one of software packages did not work with the JVM I was using, and I tweaked some Java code (I am not a Java programmer). This tweak was then rolled up into GitHub where the moderates incorporated it into the next release. Similarly for another product, I found I needed some connection pooling and working with the community we came up with C# code to pool the connections and those modifications were rolled into the next release.

I really did not spend that much time on these code changes, but open source took my minor efforts and improved the overall code base in a way that proprietary code would never have done, and if thousands of programmers are doing this, you can see how powerful open source is in driving innovation and software development.

As I side note, I did just get a patent grant on some 3D integral photography software, I created with a friend. It took almost 5 years, and in those 5 years a lot software innovation has occurred!