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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."
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.
--
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