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Democratic GPL Software Company
Markar writes "FreeDevelopers.net is a commercial software company that plans to develop GPL software, and is the brainchild of Tony Stanco, a former Security Exchange Commission attorney. Group leadership and major policy decisions are to be voted upon by the developers, making it the first democratically elected software company. FreeDevelopers.net has earned the endorsement of Richard M Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. Details at ZDNet."
(Now there's a thought. Get a burger chain to give away free Deb CDs in their kids meals... :D)
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Having seen a lot of software projects, there definitely does need to be a heirarhcy of leadership, such that the person(s) at the top have a focused goal and thus can reject ideas that general users may supply that are impractical to the project (like a breakout game in a office suite, for example). Maybe if, prior to allowing the voting of new suggestions, those suggestions are weeded out of things that are just not needed, so that only ideas that are closely related to the project goals are voted for. Those that do the weeding, of course, would have to be selected somehow as well.
But I know it's been said here before : most OSS projects live or die by how it's managed. I can't see a purely democratic management style producing something as fine-tuned as classic OSS projects.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
...and it's -potentially- a workable business model for GPL'd software.
Consider: Under the GPL, you really can't sell software the way it is typically sold now. You simply can't sell permission to use software that's freely licensed for everyone's use; that just makes no sense.
But the Open-Source model does have two rather serious flaws. First, overall development times tend to be slow, even though individual bugfix and security issue times are very fast. Second, Open-Source software "naturally" evolves, but this means there's no reliable way to control that evolution. We've seen both of these flaws illustrated to dramatic effect with Mozilla, with its very long development time and bloa^H^H^H^Hfeatureset that practically rivals Emacs.
However, those two flaws allow serious money to be made in consulting. In the case of development times, a consultant being paid to work full-time on a piece of software will generally get the job done much more quickly than ten people working in their spare time. We've seen this with Perl6 development. In the case of feature development, it allows a company to ensure that the features they need are incorporated into existing software. This is something we haven't really seen yet, but it can easily be extrapolated from the first possibility.
In the end, it's like using FedEx as opposed to the standard mail systems. Standard mail tends to be much cheaper, but FedEx will get there faster, and it's more reliable. If this model works for sending packages, why wouldn't it work for software?
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I rather think we do. THe world is littered with examples of worker and democratically controlled enterprises. They ar ewidely recognised to have a higher success rate than normal businessess because of the involvement they promote. Co-operative's have a history that stretches back more than 150 years, there are 749,000 of them worldwide and they represent nearly 725 million members (and now thier own TLD)
And where did it suggest that every part of the developemnt process was going to be put to the vote?
Paul M
"There are no innocent bystanders. What where they doing there in the first place"
Paul M
"There are no innocent bystanders. What where they doing there in the first place"
William S Burroughs
Mondragón Corporación Cooperativa is a group of big and small cooperatives in Spain. It includes many types of heavy and light industries, banks, travel agencies, hypermarkets, a university and schools. The region where they are concentrated has one of the lowest unemployment rates in Spain.
Some of the cooperatives are "pure" and others are "second-level", the members are other cooperatives.
Some of them were previously capitalistic small firms that couldn't stand the crisis. The workers got help from MCC and rescued the business.
If you are concerned about competitiveness, think who will be more dedicated to the work, a wage slave or one of the coowners of the business.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
This is a great idea. After all, the big justification for AC's is to allow people who truly need to be anonymous to post. This doesn't meaningfully restrict that, but it would cut down significantly on a certain category of mindless trolling.
That's inherently weak itself. I don't think that arguments should necessarily be evaluated depending on the identity of the author, although being able to identify authors can be very helpful contextually. In fact, your argument falls down in the very area I'm talking about: when reading an AC's message, one has to rely on cues other than identity to tell whether the author is likely to be serious or just trolling/flamebaiting.
Besides, in general, dialogs with ACs are unrewarding - it's difficult for ACs to tell when their messages have been replied to. I don't usually reply to ACs, and I see others advocate not doing so. Unless you're a Chinese mole working deep in the NSA, if you want anonymity just get yourself an anonymous, free web email account and create a Slashdot login called "ParanoidElf" or something.
We need P and EM and UL/OL/LI to make ourselves fully understood without resorting to pointlessly obscure textual conventions *like this*.
We meaning trolls, or we meaning ACs? ;)
I sometimes use *this* even in HTML messages, I don't think it's so bad.
Having zero barriers to entry results in a not-insignificant class of messages which don't add anything meaningful, and in fact actively attempt to disrupt things. I've never been in favor of eliminating Anonymous Cowards, but I think this minor restriction would be an improvement, at little cost.
I presume its going to make its money from supporting the said software.
It said in the article that the company is going to bid on government projects, but if all the government has to do is get one copy of the GPL software which it can then freely distribute according to the GPL, then isn't the revenue stream of the company going to be a bit limited ?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Every implementation of communism or socialism beyond the small group level requires people to be forced to things. But every proponent of communism or socialism (who uses those words) advocates those systems on at least a regional or national level.
What if someone decides that they don't want to be "co-owner"? What if a group wants to set up a market to sell their produce at instead of handing over to the "gatherers and sharers"? Ultimately, communism (and socialism) needs to force people to act against their human nature. That's why the only communism that has ever worked has been at a small and voluntary level. It takes authoritarian means to expand it beyond the group of volunteers sharing their stuff.
This is also the reason why the Free Software Movement(tm) of the FSF has worked: it's voluntary. It's also why the goal of 100% Free Software will never work. There will always be people who don't want to release their stuff as Free Software, and if you force them, you twist the meaning of "Free" into a cruel parody of Orwell.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
This isn't anything new (look up anarcho-sydicalism), there are cooperatives now and ususally they outperform corporations, and their employees are a hell of a lot happier.
But even there they have bosses. They're just hired by the employees instead of the board of directors.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
coercion stops you simply emptying a bank vault, or driving off with that Porsche
Since communists do not believe in private property, let me define coercion in property-less terms. Coercion is the invasion of another person's personal domain of control without their permission. Thus, striking someone's nose with your fist is coercion, because the nose belongs in their domain of control. You can hit your own nose as often as you want.
In the case of the Porsche, the coercion is the use of the vehicle without authorization of the person who controls it. There are many systems for determining who controls an object (who is the owner). Though most systems use force to protect these controls, not all force is coercion. Only the initiation of force is coercion. Of the communist societies that have existed in history, all of them have reserved the ownership of all property to the state (though they have not always exercised that reservation). Most times this exercise of control has come down to declaring with the barrel of a gun that "what is under your domain of control now belongs to the state, because we say so".
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
you are making the unwarranted and fatal assumption that 'property' is simply something natural, that arises quite unproblematically between individuals (a la Locke) without the application of state force.
It's the only assumption that I can make. Because the only property-less or communal-property systems I have ever seen have been either small voluntary groups are large state tyrannies.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Sure, like this will work. We'll just wind up squabbling in court about poor voting ballot layouts and mis-counted votes. Nothing will ever get voted in!
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
-------
CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
> Try to think instead of believing what you are told.
I actually laughed out loud when I read this!
If anyone who knew me heard anyone telling me that they would be amazed also.
I am a sceptical scientifically minded person who takes nobodys word for anything. Paranoid, I have been called, arkward, contrary, but never that I just "believe what I am told"
That I believe strongly in capitalism surprises some people. Perhaps it's because they think my beliefs come from wanting to be different. They are mistaken. My beliefs come from knowing for a fact that there are very few questions to which there is a single correct answer from which a controlling government can decide policy. I believe that any succesful governmental system must recognise that and thus not try to find one. The only way that can happen is by giving all the power to the ppl themselves to distribute amongst themselves the way they see fit. There are 2 ways to do this IMO. capitalism (_without_ the current interventionist bullshit govermnent) and anarchy.
Oh, how I wish there were another.
BTW, Capitalism will always fool the short sighted into believing that is is "unfair" or doesn't work somehow. They will see the truth once (if/when) bullying goverments get out of the way and ppl are taught how to use their power to eliminate over-powerful compaines that the governments helped to create.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
For an example of a large employee-owned company, check out:
HyVee, a large midwestern grocery store chain. Although it is run in a more authoritaian manner, all of the employees are actual owners of the chain (even part-timer baggers and shelf stockers), with shareholder rights and all of the other usual privleges. As can be expected, managers are employees who have been around awhile (since the number of shares is proportional to the length of employement). Decisions regarding what items the chain will be selling is made up of a committee of managers from several stores. If a manager is incompotent or rather unpopular, there is a very real danger of having the manager fired simply because the shareholders (= the employees) don't want him to be there.
Some side benefits are that the stores tend to not be unionized (even in strong labor union areas of the midwest--- where grocery stores tend to have a lot of union workers), have relatively low turnover of employees, and a great deal of internal promotion rather than outside hiring.
Comparing it to how some states (or at least Oregon) votes, how does something get put on the ballot even before it can be voted on? Someone gathers signatures? Or a pre-vote? Otherwise there could be hundreds of bugs, feature requests, etc that end up on the ballot. There will still have to be some higher power or gatekeeper deciding on what gets voted on.
Jason
This idea was based in part on a vision I wrote up in a 1982 white paper when I was "Manager of Interactive Architectures" at a major videotex startup -- some of the ideas for which are starting to take shape, such as an implementation of a more flexible voting scheme.
Back in the common law days, if the laws weren't simple enough for the common man to remember, they were discarded, primarily via jury nullifcation (yes, not only did they have juries back then, but juries originated among the "pagans" who didn't particularly like one guy from somewhere else telling them how to run their communities). Then the lawyers took over and made laws so complex you couldn't operate as a competent adult unless you had a law degree. Then the laws got so complex not even law degree qualified you to operate as a full citizen. Then things got _really_ corrupt, and you have to have been a political appointee to a Federal bureaucracy like the SEC, in order to just go do something that appears a bit out of the ordinary.
It looks like being a former head of the SEC, while it wasn't absolutely necessary to try the experiment in GPL software organization, was most definitely helpful in avoding the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt factors that accompanied my attempts to placate such fears with lawyers fees 15 years ago.
Having looked at the problems with my original ideas, I'm quite skeptical of the approach these guys are taking -- particularly focusing as they are on government contracting -- although I suppose this is consistent with their drawing an analogy to the kibutzim. The kibutzim received a lot of help from the Israeli government.
Seastead this.
I hope for them that they won't have an office in Paml Beach though!
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
Since not all people are good, as has been pointed out as a reason that this will fail by other commentators here, you'd figure that some sort of compromise could be reached. Electoral college, anyone?
As a person who has seen Debian work from the inside (I am a debian developer), I would like to disagree with your assessment of why it works or doesn't.
The reason it works, imho is that democracy is used where it is needed, and not used where it isn't. It is used to make changes to policy, and settle important disputes that effect all of debian. It is used for "big picture stuff".
At the same time, each developer is like a "king" when it comes to the packages that he owns. As the xfstt maintainer, I can completely fork xfstt for debian (not that I would, I am the upstream maintainer now too; something I should devote some time too very soon now that my life is settling down).
Its the balance of using democracy for big picture stuff and allowing discourse between the developers to solve the technical issues. (actually in the past it wasn't a democracy for big picture stuff).
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
- Puget Consumers Coop: highest retail sales per square foot in the Seattle area
- REI: largest member owned coop; dominates sales of outdoor recreation gear in every market where it has a store
Both of these are member owned, not employee owned, however.That's of course why Holland has the fourth largest banking sector in the world despite only having 7 million people living there. Holland is the perfect example of a country run for it's people rather than the profit of a few old men. Probably not having to fork out for unnecessary nuclear weapons helps as well.
I thought the US government focussed primarily on the needs of those who were paying them the most.
If true democracy doesn't work and a republic does, why are there far fewer people begging on the streets of Amsterdam than Washington. America may have the wealthiest people in the world, but they also have the highest poverty rate in the first world too.
Nope I'm not wrong. Think about it the fine folks at Debian take packages (many of them have written those same packages) and integrate it into a OS (the kernel tools and over 3k packages last I looked, along with an installer and a *sweet* package system) How is this so different from what these people are talking about. The Debian folks decide on features that they want to include (what packages are installed by default, what packages are ported, how things are set up by default, how they want the installer to work, package management stuff) and then they decide how this should all be done when it is done etc. Sounds like what most managers at software companies do to me. Simple fact coding is best done by one person or at most very small groups. It is then up to another group on how to put all the little parts together and make them work. Much like well Debian. They take a bunch of little bits that where written by other people. Think about it how sexy are install disks or a partition program and yet somehow it all gets done and done well. The simple fact is these are craftsmen (people, women, beings) they do the boring stuff because it needs to be done to make the sexy stuff work. In other words the Debian example is perfect the decisions aobut how to code are still going to made at the same level they have always been made in almost every software project ever. By the coder. The decisions about what to code, which in the end boil down to what features you want to include and making all of the little bits work together will be being made in the same way Debian makes those same decisions.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
I wrote "In other words the Debian example is perfect the decisions aobut how to code are still going to made at the same level they have always been made in almost every software project ever. By the coder." I pretty sure this clearly states that I do understand that the decisions about how to implement something is in fact made by the coder(s) usually one or two people with complete control that really is the only way to do it it is a creative process after all. And then you are right all of the big decisions are made by voting. This is what I said. The decision to include say for a random example, xfstt, is made in a democratic matter and then, because it is really the only way it can be done, the decisions about how to implement xfstt are made by you the maintainer. Now you say you could fork it for Debian if you wanted to. I'm sure you could. I'm also sure if you don't have a very good reason that can be explained to alot of other people you would find your CVS rights gone. I could be wrong on this please educate me if I am. I think if you reread my post and enage the sacrasm filter you will find that we agree. Debian works because the decisions about what to do. Include package x, y, and z etc etc are made by a vote. Then the decision about how to implement those decisions are made by the coders who in the end are responsible to the people who have made the decision about what to do. The great thing about democracy is that when you are one of the people who makes the decisions about what to do you are going to want to really try and make it work.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
You are 100 percent right democratic software development can not happen. I'm feeling kind of sad that I'm going to have to go tell my Debian servers that they don't exist and that I'm going to have to tell my Debian box at home (That I just got x 4.0 to work on) that it can't exist in the real world either. Mainly because you are right no one will do the boring stuff and it just can't happen because of course democracy==communism. Yup that was a very smart comment sir. Thank you for showing me the way.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Let me think ....
Let me think ....
Wasn't he associated with ...?
No! Wait!
I got it wrong.
I was thinking of the RONCO company, the makers of all of those wonderfully cheap infomercial gadgets.
Nothing to do with this at all
Nothing to do with this at all
Really!
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The Mondragon Cooperative (a very large one) is a famous example, there are others. Give me your mail and I can send you some more detailed info. There aren't any coops in the F500 because there aren't any that large ... hell, do we really need corporations that large? The only thing most corporations that large do is remove local business opportunities for people and flood communities with shit jobs (e.g., Wal-Mart, Pepsico, et. al.) The coutry has turned into a minimum wage cesspool due to this.
The idea that a democrtically run enterprise is less efficient than a hierarchical one is a myth. The reason business people hate co-ops and unions is not because they're less efficient, it's because they lose control.
--
Marx even commented, similar to your comment, that a worker caught in the assembly line mentality soon becomes disconnected from the actually work being done. If it is the worker's job to code the drivers for the HP printer set and that is all the worker does, the first few will be perfect, the last few will suck.
Automobile manufacturers realized this and now cross-train their workers to do several jobs. The ideal for the best built product is to have one craftsman work on it from start to finish. But rarely can the price of the product match the cost of making it. The solution in those cases is to create teams. The team methodology of development, I believe, is the best model for software creation.
The team can divide the labor within the team as it sees fit, but the directive of action comes from outside the team. This goes to your Effective argument. Within the military, this effictiveness can be seen with A-Team's (not the show, but the covert behind enemy line squads). They are given a mission and then they decide how to accomplish it.
It isn't democracy in the pure sense, but makes sure the overall goals are being accomplished while giving the maximum freedom to the worker. Whether or not the team has a 'leader' is up to the team, but at the end of the day, the work needs to be done.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
This ties in to the dilemma between developers and marketers. Marketers don't understand why your Word Processor shouldn't also be your email client, so when a user suggests it, the Marketers run back to the developers with this brilliant new idea. At least in current models, the developers have a chance to nix the idea. In a model where the user dictates completely . . . we have programs that crash constently. Oh wait. . . we do already.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
As a 'right-sized' business, as discussed in the latest issue of the Utne Reader, maybe a cooperative will work. But I don't think it would ever be considered an unqualified success. The 'democracy' of the marketplace is supposed to come in through the stock market. Which, we all know has nothing to do with democracy but the aforementioned plutocracy.
The American bashing, I believe, is unwarranted. Americans are idealistic about their(our) government because it does work and has brought us from a piss-poor ragatag collection of seperate interests to _the_ dominant world power. Now, all this may crumble (history tells us all empires fall) but what has brought us to this point is our idealism that we have a superior form of government, and political philosophers tend to agree that liberal democracies are the best way to run governments as it does strip out the tyranny of the few and the tyranny of the masses.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
Actually, this is also false. Capitalism is a vague term which is often abused. Personally, I think capitalism can save the world, right all wrongs, and do wonders for clearing up unsightly blemishes due to adult acne. The problems are not in the vague sense that capital is required to have a business, this is a basic rule of an industrial society-- that some sort of pooled resource (like a factory or a restaurant) is required to be used by multiple workers to produce goods or services more efficiently than those same individuals might do that work on their own, using only the resources they own personally.
Whether the shared resources belong to the state/society (socialism), to the community (communism), to no one in particular (anarchism), or to a group of owners (capitalism) is relatively uninteresting. The first three systems are fairly inclusive and basically everyone in the group is an owner. The fun part for those systems then gets to be about how to pick managers, since I think we'd all agree that if everybody in a factory wanted to do the same job, or if everyone in a restaurant wanted to wash dishes, that the shared resource would largely go wasted or be used inefficiently. So do we use consensus decision making at the community level? Do we have dictators who appoint managers? Do we hold elections for representatives who select managers as a group? In all, it becomes about this process which determines the nature of that society.
But with capitalism, the owners (literally shareholders) of the shared resource pick the managers. If you have a single shareholder (like a sole proprietorship) or a few select shareholders (like a family business), this management selection process is fairly skewed in favor of what those people want, and may or may not benefit workers. Also the rewards of the company's success go primarily to the owners, and the smaller that group is, the fewer people who benefit by default. However, there is nothing to prevent unions or other employee groups from demanding shares in companies as a condition of employment. Indeed, many of the larger companies now have efforts to make more employees shareholders. The only downside is that the number of shareholders in these companies makes that portion owned by the workers usually seem insignificant. But, again, there is nothing to prevent workers from accumulating capital in the business they work for. Indeed, if more workers did this, and then paid close attention to how they voted their shares, the nature of capitalism in the US would change dramatically. You would see the workers becoming the owners, and they would choose their managers, and they benefit from corporate success.
I do not have a signature
A company of free developers by free developers, for a free world
Theres a free world? Why wasn't I told?
http://twitter.com/onion2k
I've never seen an assembly line produce code that actually works. Your argument is flawed by something critical: efficiency works on machines and things, but only effectiveness works on people. Programmers who are responsible for a project and are able to put in serious time into a project but have some standards (i.e. checks and balances) that they must follow to continue to be paid, will be far more effective than assembly line programmers. Give someone the same task day after day after day and they may get very good at it but they'll also get very bored by it, which causes job dissatisfaction and a loss of effectiveness. Result? Bad code, bad programs, and slow response time.
I think this could work. It needs a few things to make it work:
- The programmers need to be compensated so that they can put their effort into this rather than working for another company and doing this on the side.
- The company needs to get a base of workers intelligent enough to recognize who make good leaders and pick them. This is the part of democracy that countries lack. Organizations can, however, get this (hopefully).
- Damn, I had other thoughts, but I can't remember them. Hey, I'll tell the FreeDev people instead of you! Hah!
JeffKTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
Democracy in business is a fine idea, but it doesn't necessarily equal success. A perfect example is the turnaround that Apple has experience under Steve Jobs. Jobs did a lot of things that upset the rank-and-file at Apple. No one thought that pulling the clone-makers' licenses was a good idea. Yet, here we are, and Jobs is looking pretty smart. Most of his decisions never would have survived a majority vote. Businesses need leaders who can make tough decisions; democracy does not encourage people to stand up for those decisions, lest the be voted out of importance.
When I was at UC Berkeley in the late 1980's, there was a company in Berkeley called Mt Xinu (read it backwards) doing Unix software development. They were a full-on collective of, I think, around 40 people or so, making decisions and sharing ownership in much the way discussed here. They were quite successful in it's time, although I don't know where they are now (of course, the software market has changed quite a bit since then. I was working for the Computer Systems Research Group at UCB, the team that developed BSD Unix then, and Mt Xinu were in fact the first people in the world to take delivery of BSD 4.3 in the summer of 1986 (I think Mt Xinu's founders were friends of CSRG members).
:) There are, at least here in California, quite a few successful collectively run companies.
So, be careful when you go around waving that 'first' sign, folks, or cranky old-timers like me will complain!
mahlen
My old mother...always says, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you look them in the face hard enough they generally run away. She is a very
courageous woman, my lord.
--Mervyn Bunter, "Clouds of Witness" by Dorothy Sayers
I worked for a very small company where we did the same thing. Guess we weren't smart enough to have our massive PR machine brainwash the world that we were doing something revolutionary. Probably because we didn't think we were. I'm sure other companies have done the same thing. They just didn't earn the endorsement of RMS and the FSF...whatever that's supposed to mean.
I agree but I think you miss one point. Programmers are doing stuff for free now. The thing is they're tending to do what they want not what other's want. So if we make it democratic then a programmer who wants to code a SCSI driver for his old machine, might instead be told no that's not important the people want you to work on USB support. The programmer doesn't have USB on his machine, so instead quits the group. This could be a downside to this idea. I think.
-cpd
Indeed. The idea of a truly democratic company is noble, idealistic... and unrealistic...
:-) Market surveys are not democracy, they are an attempt to judge the trends and moods of the buying public so that the leaders of the corporation can figure out how to manipulate it in best accordance with their vision. Do not confuse being asked your opinion with having a say in the outcome.
Successful projects are driven by strong leadership, even "cults of personality." FDR was the closest thing the US has had to a king, and one of its most successful builders. Microsoft is the Bill Gates (or Bill Gates / Steve Ballmer) cult. Sun's vision comes from Scott McNealy and Bill Joy. Let me point out that even non-commercial open-software groups follow this trait. When you think of Linux, does a particular person come to mind? GNU? Perl?
The developers involved in these projects choose what to work on, but they choose it from among the things that the managers (volunteer or paid) put into the engineering plan, and they tend to conform to the vision of the leading visionary/ies of the project.
Companies also need strong leadership - they are dictatorships, though the best ones are "enlightened dictatorships" which give some of the dictatorial powers to different people in the organization through meritocratic appointments. The bland, ruthless bureaucracy promoted by this poster is also inefficient for reasons of low worker morale and high turnover.
Look at "poster boy" companies like Saturn or SAP: workers get some say in their work through merit gaining them say, pay is equitable but not equal, people are treated well, creativity is encouraged - but at the end of the day there are managers who manage, and a single vision handed down by the leaders which everyone is expected to work towards.
Letting developers vote on their projects also won't lead to a market-driven product that will sell (though not only developers make those mistakes
An enlightened dictatorship is the best way to run a company. People need leadership, markets value stability (electing a new corporate president every 4 years would spook investors), and a collective rarely - if ever - has the vision to inspire innovation (though having a lot of smart, creative people around to translate that vision into a reality is a necessity for a truly exceptional business).
Being a member of the executive committee of a company, I can assure you that consensus decision making is inefficient, indeed prone to deadlock, and that given the necessity of a business to move quickly, respond to markets, present a coherent image to clients, and other things that a non-commercial entity may not need to do... even in committees what generally winds up happening is that the most powerful executive prevails and thus "it" is done...
True democracy is rare in government, even rarer in business... not everyone can, or wants to, be the boss. Decisions aren't easy.
I wish true democracy did work for running a business, it is a great ideal. However, if you want to actually get anything done, someone still needs to have executive power, veto power over any committee, and the vision to make a coherent group working towards a common goal out of a collection of individuals.
o/~ we are pissed, we are pissed, we have to resist... o/~ - ec8or
Quick post becuase I'm way tired and I don't want to make the S/N higher than it has to be:
It is true that most large (i.e. n developers for n > 1 ;-) ) projects need coordination and leadership (c.f. the programmer team ``layout'' described in Fred Brook's _The Mythical Man Month_, probably the seminal text on SoftEng, whereby you have one head ``architect'', a ``junior architect'', a few ``toolsmiths'', and a bunch of ``implementers''). Initially, yes, a democracy may seem unworkable due to the communication overhead involved in reaching consensus on everything. However, the power of democracy may also be used within the organization to allocate positions of power to the most worthy candidates (Ms. X has the most design experience so she gets elected to the 6 mo term of ``Lead Architect and All Around Object Model Person'', etc), analogous to our meatspace political system, a government of the coders, for the coders, and by the coders.
You could argue that this isn't pure democracy, and you'd be right. But a meritocracy / representative democracy would be a damn sight better than most of the slave pits I've coded in...
As far as ``boring'' goes (maybe another comment, no sleep in 27 hours). well, yeah, but then you have the knowledge you're a) getting paid to do boring work, b) getting paid to code, which is better than working at McDonalds or some shit, and c) maybe making the world a better place in some small way by having your code out there to educate/inspire/etc/whatever another coder and/or by helping some suit appreciate the power of open source tools.
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News for Geeks in Austin, TX
> This is another one of those ideas, like
> Communism, which are only really going to work
> in some mythical fairy-tale land where people
> are good and work for the benefit of all.
> Unfortunately, we don't live in that world.
The difference here though, is that the only people in the system are those who chose to be in it. That's what makes it nothing whatsoever like communism or any other choice-free authoritarian system.
This is about _choosing_ to do whats good for everyone, much like I do already in my spare time with open source software, and so do many others.
Communism on the other hand is about forcing others to do things for the good of others whether they like it or not.
In one system, you can be a hero and be happy to think you made good choices. In the other you are a slave and you get no choice at all.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
In a business, efficiency saves money, produces more, and earns more. While the end result is a dehumanizing assembly line which is the most efficient method, it also is the most authoritarian with each worker given a specific duty.
Most corporations do include an element of democracy. It is called market surveys. Taking the governance philosophy of democracy and applying it to business is a recipe for a very flat bland business. That is one of the effects of democracy, it chops off the extremes. This is good when the extremes are the hyper-negative, but bad when the other extreme is genius.
Some real considerations that should be made are in internal authority structures. We are locked into a hierarchical-pyramid authority structure. I'd like to see some experiments in other models.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
This is another one of those ideas, like Communism, which are only really going to work in some mythical fairy-tale land where people are good and work for the benefit of all. Unfortunately, we don't live in that world.
There's a reason why all major open-source projects to date are controlled by a small number of people. It's because it becomes next to possible to get any real direction when you've got to pander to the masses. Instead, you end up with a series of watered-down proposals that offend nobody and excite even less people, and which will make FreeDevelopers.net a hugely dull company that goes nowhere.
And of course there's the fact that the sort of thing which this company might end up being paid for is hugely boring, and open source doesn't do boring. There's no kudos in plugging away at an open source inventory program is there? It sounds far more 31337 to be a kernel hacker, and I can see people drifting away from this project as they get bored with it.
Nice idea, but it's not going to happen. Democratic software development is an ideal that just won't be successfully implented ever.
Jon Erikson, IT guru