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The Success of Open Source
Weber is an academic and makes no apologies for it. He is not presenting an exciting new business plan, advocating a particular method of software development, or calling hackers to revolution. He is simply describing his findings after extensive research of the Open Source development process and drawing conclusions from them. As such, this book may not appeal to everyone in the Open Source community. However, Weber's ideas are timely and informative for anyone who wants to explain or advocate Open Source. He likens his work to The Machine that Changed the World, the story of Toyota's production method (224):
That book made two simple and profound points: The Toyota "system" was not a car, and it was not uniquely Japanese. The parallels are obvious. Open source is not a piece of software, and it is not unique to a group of hackers.
The first part of The Success of Open Source is a historical case study that examines the origins and social development of the Open Source community. It begins with Unix and hacker culture. For those who have read Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and Peter Salus' A Quarter Century of UNIX, there is little new material here, but Weber offers a new and interesting perspective on the events. For example, he offers the insight that "hacker culture" existed before widespread network connectivity, drawing into question whether cheap bandwidth is really essential.
From there, he covers the development of the BSDs, Apache, and Linux, focusing again on social structures. He describes diverse events such as the messy expulsion of Theo de Raadt from the NetBSD core, the creation of Apache by an informal group of interested developers, and the establishment of Alan Cox as de facto Linux networking lieutenant. Weber draws from an impressive array of firsthand accounts, including mailing lists, websites, conference speeches, and personal interviews.
I get some interesting trivia out of this, such as Larry McVoy's original Unix is dying troll (98). Unfortunately, since Weber's narrative is mainly topical, it is occasionally redundant in telling one story from multiple social angles. Other claims are close to flamebait, such as suggesting that Richard Stallman is an example of a "failed leader." (168)
For the second half of the book, Weber moves on to Explaining Open Source in the terms of his discipline, political economy. He sees two broad categories of principles to the Open Source process: Microfoundations, including individual motivations and the economic logic of the collective good; and Macro-Organization, solving the problems of coordination and complexity. (133) While I doubt each reader will catch every academic nuance in these chapters, Weber is thankfully sparing in his use of specialized vocabulary and writes his overall argument in clear, easy-to-follow logic.
This section also contains the most insightful observations in The Success of Open Source. While there are too many to list here, one is the concept of Open Source Software as antirival. As more copies are made and put into use, value increases as a result of a larger market and the small percentage of users that contribute bug reports and possibly patches. This turns the traditional "free rider" problem into an advantage.
Though Weber does not mention this in the text, one can see part of this principle in proprietary vendors' providing free downloads or turning their backs on rampant piracy. It also does not take a great leap of logic to see application of the antirival model to other fields such as music or academic research.
As is customary in social science literature, Weber uses his conclusion to both recap his argument and to raise questions for future direction of research. What is the best organization method for property distribution, as opposed to the current methods based on exclusion? How can the Open Source production process be used effectively to improve prospects for the developing world? What is the best way for closed, hierarchical systems to interact with open, network-based ones? While some of the issues involved are offtopic for this book, hopefully future work will examine these questions in depth.
Though Open Source has been mentioned in many recent works, The Success of Open Source is the first academic book that focuses on the Open Source community as its object of study. It gives a readable, thought-provoking, and occasionally funny account of what Open Source is and means, making it an extremely valuable resource for those who want to engage and discuss these issues on an intellectual level. As Weber states, his positive, constructive outlook "may not be fully satisfying, but it's not a bad place to start." (272)
Joshua Daniel Franklin is a graduate student at the University of Washington's Information School. This review may be redistributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. You can read the table of contents, preface, and an excerpt of the first chapter of The Success of Open Source at the Harvard University Press website. The reviewer's website has an list of errata. You can purchase the The Success of Open Source from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Yes, it's at the bottom, and nobody reads the entire book review.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
because they're different and opposite in philosophy
Says you and Stallman. The Apache people seem to think otherwise. And I'd say that they've done an exceedingly good job of making their point. As have the Mozilla people.
Stallman's philosophy is that every piece of software in existence should be free. That raises the question of who's going to pay for all the R&D, usability studies, artwork, customer support, etc? In Apache's case, a large number of interested corporations and individuals have helped foot the bill for a greater cause. Same for the Mozilla project, save that Netscape/AOL ate a large portion of the bill. RedHat, SuSE, and other commercial entities continually help foot the bill for GNOME, KDE, the kernel, dev tools, and other desktop development.
And yet, SuSE (wisely) held onto YaST and SAX long enough to give themselves an edge over the competition. If it was open source to begin with, what would SuSE's advantage have been?
The ideas are not mutually exclusive. Only the desire to not work together makes them mutually exclusive.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
But, they won't sell it to you without software updates support for the first year.
That's some serious dough... but the good news is that if you don't run Oracle in a commercial/production environment, you can download and develop against it for free. So, really, Oracle also tries to benefit from the OpenSource mentality. If no OpenSource project supported Oracle directly, then Oracle wouldn't be nearly as popular. So, they let you download and run it (and have allowed this for over 6 years).
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
IANAE, but AFAIK traditional free rider problem would involve a public good that everyone can exploit provided by some subset of the population that has some sort of cost involved in providing that good.
IANAE either, but it seems to me that the important advantage of open source is that it makes no difference how many free riders there are, since the only additional cost to the developers is bandwidth, which is cheap or even free (if you use sourceforge, or something similar). So even if one out of a thousand users contributes something, and there are millions of users, things are going quite well, despite 99.9% free riders.
It's a book review!
The original article can be found at here, among other places.
I know, I know, it was (probably) a joke. It's just that the "Insightful" moderation I saw got to me.
The idea is that as your usage base grows, some small percentage of that base will become active contributors, as opposed to just free riders. In other scenarios not involving open source the opportunity for a free rider to become a contributor may not exist, or be limited to bug reports. Basically, with open source increasing your market share can also mean increasing your development force.
I'm not sure that turns free riders into an "advantage" per se, but it does help explain how open source projects scale. Clearly, giving "free riders" a chance to not be free riders if they have the talent and time is better than making it impossible for them to contribute.
The enemies of Democracy are
The concept of open source is now thoroughly out of the box, and already moving into areas beside IT. Here are a few examples:
..."0 4_01.h tml
N ews&file= article&sid=815
1) ""Researchers in Australia and India are sidestepping agriculture patents held by the likes of Monsanto and DuPont to develop competitive technologies and foods (such as a high-protein potato) that are, by design, open and unrestricted. In pharmaceuticals, India is skirting patents to create generic AIDS drugs that are orders of magnitude cheaper than those made by the transnational drug companies
http://www.mediajunk.com/public/archives/20
also,
http://www.wacc.org.uk/modules.php?name=
2) The California Open Source Textbook Project www.opensourcetext.org has been created to provide open source printed books for K-12 students in California, and eventually the world.
www.opensourcetext.org
3) MIT's OpenCourseWare project has been created to provide free university curriculum to students
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
4) Wikipedia is a great example of open source content with it's many open source projects
www.wikipedia.org
There are many other examples, currently, of cooperative efforts to share intellectual capital.
This is exactly the R&D system used in the former Soviet Union. A good friend of my was a physicist there and worked, of course, for the state, and told me how it worked. A certain portion of proceeds collected from other ventures went to R&D. Of course, the "public" owned the output, because the public did the investment.
The USSR invested amazing amounts of money in R&D, and had some good results (for those that don't know, a USSR scientist came up with the stealth technology the US makes such great use of). However, by any measure I've seen, money invested in research produced less results in the USSR than in the US. Also, in spite of patents, etc, the US public gets the greater good (see health care statistics - mortality, fertility, life expectancy - in the US as compared to the USSR in the same time periods).
The collectivization of R&D sounds good on paper, but the "real world labrotories" of the USSR, N Korea, China, and so on, have had poor luck (even resetting for factors like development level). Countries with privatized R&D (US, Western Europe, Southeast Asia) seem to get more bang for the research buck.
Sarcasm and hyperbole are the final refuges for weak minds
I'm surprised the reviewer of this book didn't take the time to look into Weber's history. He's not a tech guy; he's a professor of political science. Not long ago I downloaded a draft paper of his called "The Political Science of Open Source" which seems to be a draft for this book - the themes overlap nicely. Weber is working at BRIE, the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy. The paper is here.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.