July 10, 2004
Kuhn's landmark book
emergic.org Time after time in recent years, industry pundits have proclaimed we live in revolutionary times. All too often, experts hail a new paradigm for computing. Most recently, Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, and creator of the Global Network Navigator (GNN), considered by some to be the first Web portal as well as the first true commercial site on the Web, published the Open Source Paradigm Shift, a written version of a talk he first gave at Warburg-Pincus' annual technology conference in May, 2003. A Google search for "paradigm shift" results in ca. 355,000 responses. Most of the people who invoke the phrase probably haven't read Thomas Kuhn's landmark book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I first read Kuhn while at university in the early 1980s, and have often cited his argument on the nature of the paradigm shift and scientific revolutions. I am not certain that one can - at the present time - apply the concept of the paradigm shift to the open source movement.

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