Discussion of The relevance of Open Source to Hydroinformatics by Hamish Harvey and Dawei Han, 2002 J. Hydroinf. 4(4), 219–234

The authors have to be congratulated on a truly excellent paper describing the relevance of the Open Source movement to hydroinformatics. It is clearly understood, and indeed taken as given, that this movement would be impossible without the prior existence of the Internet. The subject of this paper is so important to hydroinformatics, however, not only for explaining the potential of developments in the Open Source movement to date, but for the perspectives that it opens up when these developments are combined with another stream of development, which is that of a further ongoing revolution in communications technologies and their associated sociotechnologies. This second stream of development is also closely associated with the use of the Internet, but in a different way and for a different purpose, being directed to making the productions of such groups as those pioneered by the Open Source movement much more widely available within society as a whole. This second stream is thus associated more with the use of advanced software systems by persons and organisations that know little or nothing of the software itself, but are only concerned to use this software for their own purposes. In the parlance of postmodernism, these are ‘consumers of knowledges’ of a wide variety of kinds rather than ‘knowers’ of these knowledges. This second stream of development is then so important specifically in hydroinformatics because hydroinformatics knits together strands of so many different kinds of sciences and technologies and applies its resulting productions in so many different ways. The different knowledges that must then be brought into play must then be distributed over many individuals and organisations, both on the supply side, as this is being transformed by Open Source systems, and on the demand side, which is also on