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Shirky: Given Enough Eyeballs, Are Features Shallow?

Posted by timothy on from the magic-shiny-things dept.

cshirky writes "A persistent criticism of open source is that it is more about copying features than creating new ones. While this criticism is overblown, the literature of open source is richer on the subject of debugging than design. I've written an article about Ben Hammersley's LazyWeb.org, wondering whether open source methods plus RSS distribution can do for feature requests what open source already does for bug fixes, namely parallelize the problem in ways not available to closed source development methods."

1 of 275 comments (clear)

  1. Open source *has* innovated/been successful... by cygnusx · · Score: 5, Informative

    ... but not necessarily in areas suits would like. It is worth it to remember that Clay Shirky (who submitted this article) is a well-known VC, so from his viewpoint it is understandable that Python would not seem very innovative.

    Open source uber-successes (innovation + usability): Apache, Sendmail, Perl, Python, PHP, emacs, vim (vim adds sufficiently to vi to justify it being innovative imho)

    Open source successes (usability): Nautilus, Gnome, KDE, Evolution, the Linux kernel, GPG, glibc, Mozilla, OpenSSL, OpenSSH

    Open source failures*: Directory Servers, Calendaring/Groupware servers, Office software, desktop publishing tools, graphics/prepress tools (the Gimp isn't a prepress tool), message queueing systems, heavy duty databases (despite SAP/DB).

    I see a pattern here: Open source does pretty well at stock protocols that fulfil community/individual needs, it has even done reasonably well at end-user desktops (Nautilus being the crowing example -- if only the rest of the Linux desktop was that good! :-))

    Where we have not done well is about stuff that solves suits' needs: directory servers and groupware being a classic example.

    I think we'll need some initiative from the industry now to fill these gaps, because it is not obvious that the community is going to scratch those itches anytime soon. Sun's open-sourcing StarOffice was great, OpenOffice has a chance of catching up with MSOffice in ~2 years. I sometimes wonder what would happen if IBM were to walk the talk and open up *any* of the following: DB/2, Domino+Notes, SmartSuite.

    * yes, I am aware of OpenLDAP and OpenOffice, thank you.