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Users as Innovators - Why Open Source Works

Posted by timothy on from the pave-your-path-where-the-grass-is-bent dept.

eaglemoon writes "Many people still have difficulty understanding why open source software projects are successfull. The Boston Globe has an interview with Eric von Hippel, a Professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, on users as innovators. In his new book, von Hippel, discusses how open source projects draw on the creativity of ''lead users," who are often ahead of the curve on technology and marketplace trends. Von Hippel shows the trend already is more advanced than is generally known, and users often freely reveal their innovations for the common good. The social efficiency of a system in which individual innovations are developed by individual users is increased if users somehow diffuse what they have developed to others.....he also notes that the transition to user-centered innovation is hard for some companies to swallow.
The online version of the book is available under a Creative Commons license."

59 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. OSS discovers science. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    So in other words, Open Source discovers what scientists already knew.

    1. Re:OSS discovers science. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Or perhaps it is re-proving what corporate influence is helping the scientific community to forget.

  2. Open Source Presentation by siokaos · · Score: 5, Informative

    My writing class had an open topic presentation, and some friends of mine and I just did a presentation on the Business and Development elements of open source projects :)

    Check it out
    http://neuclid.com/OpenSourcePres.pdf

    --
    http://siokaos.org/
  3. Problem by elid · · Score: 4, Insightful

    One major problem with open-source is the lack of artists willing to work under such a license. For an example ot what results, see the "new" FreeCIV.

    1. Re:Problem by Short+Circuit · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Positive example: OpenQuartz. They made a Free replacement for Quake I's content.

      --
      tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
    2. Re:Problem by aCapitalist · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The reason is that artists don't have a culture of sharing like coders do (way before FSF or GNU), because that model doesn't really work with art - at least traditional art for obvious reasons.

    3. Re:Problem by aCapitalist · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Compound with this the fact that modern society rewards less than 1% of all artists and you have a population of starving artists

      Are graphic designers starving artists? Are game world/model/texture artists starving?

      The development of those above mediums tends to be a much individualistic process than code. Now whether that is just cultural/traditional or otherwise is another story, but that's just the way it seems to be.

      As far as "modern society rewarding less than 1% of all artists"...if the other 99% were any good then they wouldn't be starving now would they?

    4. Re:Problem by bersl2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This needs to be modded up higher.

      In general, artists fear that someone will claim their work as their own, so they tend to be very anal about their babies: often, they ask that you not redistribute or alter their images, which kind of goes against the whole idea of free culture. (Trivia: the Berne Convention happened essentially at Victor Hugo's insistence. Case in point.)

      We must mollify their fears if we are to largely gain them as an ally. We must show them that they will be no worse off using the principles of free culture than they are now, if they are willing to accept some change.

      I cannot stress the importentce they play.

    5. Re:Problem by NanoGator · · Score: 5, Interesting

      "One major problem with open-source is the lack of artists willing to work under such a license. For an example ot what results, see the "new" FreeCIV."

      I see your point, but I'm not sure the problem is the licensing. I think it's the lack of incentive.

      To get a job as an artist, you have to do some stand-out work and/or have project experience. Sadly, this creates a nasty problem: How does one get a job as an artist if they haven't had a job as an artist? The answer? Do some cool stuff on your own. Many artists do this. (Check out www.cgtalk.com to see what I mean.) However, it can be difficult for a self-starter to complete some ambitious work. I know I had that problem. If I couldn't get something done in an evening, I wouldn't do it. So what'd I do? Simple: I took on some pro-bono work.

      I did some artwork for a game called Ferion. (Now some of you will understand why it's in my sig.) There was no paycheck. Instead, the agreement was that I'd do the work provided I could take the time I needed to expand on my artform. The result? The work I did for Ferion almost single-handedly got me my dream job. There's absolutely no way I would have produced anything like that without somebody needing me to do it. I'm too lazy.

      So, how's this relate to OSS? I think really all it needs is the right presentation. There are LOTS of people who want to make artwork for a living. So long as they know that they're gaining valuable experience, you'll be able to find people willing to get the job done. If the project can offer some visibility, even better!

      --
      "Derp de derp."
    6. Re:Problem by NanoGator · · Score: 5, Interesting

      "The reason is that artists don't have a culture of sharing like coders do (way before FSF or GNU), because that model doesn't really work with art - at least traditional art for obvious reasons."

      You'd be surprised. Head on over to www.scifi-meshes.com. There are models of a bunch of starships there that anybody can download. Then you can post your artwork with those models. It's been around for years.

      You've got a point that traditional artwork isn't so easy to share. However, communities can share in more ways than one. Technique is just as valuable as sharing code. At least with the communities I hang out with, most people are quite happy to share how they achieved a certain effect. Quite a few even take the time to post how-to's.

      I realize we're not talking about precisely the same thing here, but I hope you get my point. Quite a bit of time is spent between artists helping each other out.

      --
      "Derp de derp."
    7. Re:Problem by Benny2891 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      There are artists out there who do embrace the FOSS method in the production of their work. They just don't make graphics for video games. (As far as I know). There is a population of contemporary "fine" artists (I really hate that term) who are attempting to do this. You are not going to see there work in conventional venues that often however. Simon Yuill and Chad McCail are working on such a project [http://www.spring-alpha.org]. [http://www.agile-process.com/] and [http://www.machinista.org/] are other examples of artists looking at this. There are others, I just mentioned these to make a point. In a lot of ways, artists and programmers operate in similar ways.
      Actually, I am one of them. I recently started a PhD candidacy on this very topic. While my research is still very much in the early stages, I am beginning to realise that in order for the FOSS way of doing things to be more widely adapted, the methodologies need to be reworked. I don't think that actually economics are the determining factor here. Very few of the artists I know (and I know a lot) make much money from the direct production of there artwork. They need to supplement their income either by doing something like teaching or constantly chasing down grants, endowments and the like. It wouldn't be too hard to make the argument that "opening" your practise would actually help you secure more of this type of income. For the most part, Creative Commons [www.creativecommons.org] is sorting out the availability of licenses that are appropriate for artwork, so thats not that big of a deal. I think the biggest reason that artists are reluctant to embrace this kind of working is that we are still too hung up on the "original". It is deeply ingrained in the collective culture of the the arts. Originality of the idea and the art object itself is of the highest value when artists are assessing art. The FOSS way of doing things is perceived as encouraging copying and unoriginality. This is a big no-no for your average contemporary artist. If artists were just to look their history, they would realise that this obsession with the original is a relatively new thing, and that all creative works are built on top of the creative output that has already happened.
      While all that i just mentioned is within the framework of art as in Tate Modern / Guggenheim kind of art, the artists that do more commercial work most likely went through some sort of art education that the "fine" artists went to. They all more or less leaned the same values, and regard their work in a similar way.I think it will be a while before you see this happening more commonly in areas like Graphic Design and CG stuff.

  4. Another reason might be... by Sprotch · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That Open Source is successful in markets abandonned by other companies. Firefox took over where IE 3.0 had left. Open Office might be doing something similar. Users will only be milked for so long...

    1. Re:Another reason might be... by MrKahuna · · Score: 2, Insightful

      and yet another reason may be what is "missing" in the open source world, namely the marketing/corporate layer that usually sits between the users and the developers. Think about all the fluff that's between these 2 groups in most large software companies. Without direct interaction much of the potentially valuable communication gets lost or, at best, watered down.

    2. Re:Another reason might be... by timmyf2371 · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Considering IE 4/5 were far superior web browsers to the existing Netscape 4.x web browser suite, I would say it's fair to say the Firefox has started to innovate from where IE 6 left off.

      In regards to Open Office, yes it's free both as in beer and speech, however in terms of quality IMO it is not yet a patch on Microsoft Office by any means.

      --

      Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
  5. Scratching an itch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Linux came about and developed because a bunch of people needed it for 'something'. It wasn't easily available so they developed it themselves. The trick was for Linus to provide a starting point and then not get in the way too badly.

    Half the secret of encouraging innovation is just to stay out of the way. That's a lot easier with open source than with proprietary products.

  6. the user's perspective by kebes · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Users will have a perspective on products that the programmer never will--namely the perspective of someone who *doesn't understand* how the application works! After designing and/or programming a piece of software for a long time, you can get to know it so well that every aspect of it seems obvious. Yet to a fresh user, who has no clue what is going on behind the scenes, your choice of layout may seem confusing. It has been said (many times) before, but programmers/designers need to *listen* to what users are saying. If something is hard to use, then it should be fixed! And yes, the users of a product will have tons of useful ideas for how to make a product better.

    Programmers know too much about the inner workings of a system... and thus they will immediately think of all the reasons why an innovative idea (interface element or feature) won't work. But the naive user, not encumbered by such restrictive thinking, may propose powerful features and novel interaction schemes. Some of these won't work, and some really are too hard to code, but there are many gems.

    1. Re:the user's perspective by Bastian · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The most fun example of this in my experience is when I make a request for a feature or modification to the functionality of a program, and the programming staff (who, naturally, aren't the ones who are using the tools they produce day in and day out) dismiss the request without much discussion by claiming, in essence, that they know what's best and the users don't know what they want. It's not uncommon for this to take the form of them responding to a complaint about some aspect of the software that everyone who uses it finds infuriating with some permuntation of the classic, "That's a feature, not a bug."

      (disclaimer - I should admit that my job responsibilities include a bit of programming and maintenance, and I can't claim to be innocent of having done this in the past, either.)

    2. Re:the user's perspective by zobier · · Score: 2, Funny
      Users will have a perspective on products that the programmer never will--namely the perspective of someone who *doesn't understand* how the application works!
      What are you talking about I know plenty of developers who don't understand how the application works!
      --
      Me lost me cookie at the disco.
    3. Re:the user's perspective by daigu · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Inputs from a variety of people are going to lead - on average - to a more creative solution than a solution devised by a single person. Of course, there are genius programmers, just as there are genius users. But, they aren't the norm.

      Although, I would agree with you if I had to select one or another, I'd probably leave it to the programer to solve the problem. But this isn't an OR situation. It is an AND where users work together with programers. It is also a situation where there may not be a defined problem until the user identifies it.

  7. Bottom-up innovation by Spy+der+Mann · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think this may have to do with companies' "top-down" corporate education. They believe they're "the best", they spend MILLIONS on hiring "the best". They spend millions on maintaining this structure, hiring even more people, buying the competition (*cough* Microsoft *cough*), etc etc.

    What can a simple user teach them? What can one single guy do? He's got no budget, doesn't have the resources to get "the best of the best", and can't possibly manage dealing with copyright issues. 'You think a bunch of hobbyists can do better than us?'

    Bottom-up, gentlemen, bottom-up.

    1. Re:Bottom-up innovation by cgenman · · Score: 4, Interesting

      They believe they're "the best", they spend MILLIONS on hiring "the best".

      I know you put "the best" in quotes for a reason, but it's worth pointing out that corporations in no way get "the best" for their money.

      Generally speaking, corporations are stuck in the illusion that if something costs more, it must be better. An employee that was making 105k as an Active X programmer must be better than the QNX programmer making 85k, so let's hire the 105k programmer and pay him 125k. If a fast-talking guy can come in and say all of the right things, the heads will believe that this guy is the perfect person to be lead programmer, even though he just sold you on the idea of doing your 1,000 concurrent user database app in Access. Corporations are great at throwing money at getting great salesmen, but they're not always so good at getting good leaders, programmers, designers, etc.

      --
      The ______ Agenda
    2. Re:Bottom-up innovation by QuantumG · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You do know there are technology companies out there that let the engineers hire people themselves? When I was at VMWare an interview took all day. The recruit would be taken around to every engineer in the company and asked to help out with whatever the engineer was working on. The engineer would form an opinion of the person and their abilities and then send them on to the next engineer. This worked especially well because, at the time, every engineer at VMWare had their own office, or shared with 1 or 2 other engineers, but there were no cubicals. At the end of the day the recruit was sent away and the team leaders asked everyone what they thought of the recruit. If there was an overall good feeling the recruit got hired.

      --
      How we know is more important than what we know.
  8. Just remember by YrWrstNtmr · · Score: 4, Insightful
    open source projects draw on the creativity of "lead users," who are often ahead of the curve on technology and marketplace trends.

    Some of those curves and trends lead to dead ends. Valid dead ends.

    Don't get discouraged when they do, know when to kill it, and move on in a different direction. But do move on.

  9. Polish by mr.+marbles · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My question is even though Open Source can create massive amounts of ground work, why is it still generally incapable of shipping fully polished products? Take a look at the Mac, they went the extra mile, they took all the innovation of the open source world and did all the work hobbiest don't do. What does open source need to make linux or something else fully polished? What makes open source projects like Firefox beat the curse?

    1. Re:Polish by jehreg · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Structured QC/QA team. That's what makes or breaks a FOSS project.

    2. Re:Polish by jayloden · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I often think about this very topic...if someone or someones would come along and put the pedal to the medal on polishing those things off, Linux would become one hell of a competitor.

      I think it comes down to the hacker mindset, where the interesting problem is king. No one wants to work on the "boring" tasks like cleaning up GUI buttons and interface text. They'd rather work out exotic new gut level kernel code or rough out the next great feature. We're always questing for the next feature and getting it sketched into the system, and never quite get around to inking everything in. I think eventually, this will happen, at least to some degree. In some places it IS happening, but it's going to take time.

      -Jay

    3. Re:Polish by Bastian · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The same thing that allows the OSS community to produce so much ground work so efficiently is what keeps many (most?) projects from becoming particularly polished. The great majority of OSS programmers like to just sit down and hack stuff out, and aren't particularly interested in the overhead and extra effort involved in maintaining a high degree of internal coordination and consistency. Plus, since most OSS developers are working on a volunteer basis, you can't really force anyone to conform to anyone else's standards.

      I haven't been a member of the OSS community for very long - about a decade - but I get the impression that this is largely a fairly recent cultural development that coincides rather closely with the rise of Linux. If you look further back at older projects such as BSD Unix and XFree86, you may notice that there isn't nearly as much of this explosion of forks and competing projects. BSD only has five OSS offspring that I can think of - Free, Open, Net, Darwin, and Dragonfly. Of these, all have very different goals - FreeBSD is aimed at being a high performance Unix for commodity hardware. OpenBSD is designed to be rock-solid secure and stable. NetBSD is insanely portable. Darwin has its own kernel and is largely a move by Apple to get OSS help in developing its own operating system, and Dragonfly is aimed at scalability.

      Compare this with the Linux community, where there are oodles of different distributions - many with only minor differences in architecture or philosophy - in a constant state of flux. Many of the Linux distributions that I have used as my primary OS over the years have all but disappeared (Yggdrasil), and many others appear to be in a state of rapid decline (Slackware).

      Again, this is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, this culture leads to a tremendous amount of exploration and innovation - consider the plethora of package management philosophies you have to choose from in the linux world, or the huge pile of GUI toolkits available to software developers. On the other hand, this leads to a whole mess of duplicated (some would say wasted) effort - consider how many different packages of the same program many software projects have to maintain and how most major distributions roll their own packages of all the most popular software, or how you may find yourself installing several UI libraries (all of which, you must admit, mostly do the exact same thing) in order to use all the applications you want.

      The projects that escape this - Mozilla, the Linux kernel, Mono, etc. - mostly do so because they get a lot of corporate backing, which provides a lot of paid developers and business discipline which can exert a degree of control over the swarm of amateur and hobbyist programmers who are constantly coming and going.

    4. Re:Polish by Peter+La+Casse · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think it's a matter of the "90/90" rule; the first 90% is the fun part, and the second 90% is the not fun part.

    5. Re:Polish by daVinci1980 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Mod parent up. This is *exactly* the reason.

      The first 90% is all of the fun stuff. Database access, rendering engines, networking layers...

      The last 90% is all of the unsexy stuff. UI layout, tweaking and bugfixing. Pesky user complaints. That one case that violates the rule. Then the other case that violates the rule. Then ...

      --
      I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
    6. Re:Polish by Bastian · · Score: 2, Informative

      Linux may be a kernel, but linux distributions are operating systems.

      It turns out that all the BSD babies have kernels as well.

      Linux distributions can all run pretty much the same software, and in many ways all the major linux distros are far more similar to each other than the various BSDs are to each other.

      I think what I'm trying to say is, I really have no idea what you're trying to get at, here.

  10. Lead Users by pyrrhonist · · Score: 4, Funny
    In his new book, von Hippel, discusses how open source projects draw on the creativity of "lead users," who are often ahead of the curve on technology and marketplace trends.

    I'm made of copper, you insensitive clod!

    --
    Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
  11. Or it can just be the numbers by houghi · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There are a lot of OS projects. Just look at sourceforge. The when there is something interesting, people are ABLE to join. If you do not think it is interesting, you leave it alone.

    A lot of FOSS projects never reach version 0.2

    Also every normal maner is able (or at least should be able) to tell you that if you have a project and you give some of it out to those who need to work with that project, they will be your best advertisers and your cheapest ideatank of that project.

    So instead of saying we are going to be a more secure company ask everybody How can we become a more secure company and we would like you to lead this with our help. The difficult part is to listen to those who do not have the functions but do have the idea.

    Everybody who ever went to some basic teambuilding session or weekend will be able to tell you why and how.

    --
    Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
  12. Re:MIT by AvantLegion · · Score: 4, Funny
    >> PLEASE, can we get some opinions from some other schools please. There is nothing this professor is saying that hasn't already been said a thousand times on slashdot.

    Indeed. Quotes from my professors that are regularly on Slashdot:

    "In our discussion on type systems last session, we noted that, in Soviet Russia, systems type YOU!"

    "A lambda term is in normal form if it contains neither a redex nor hot grits."

    "In Korea, only old people use the nameless lambda calculus."

    "An ALU may consist of an adder, a block carry circuit, an input circuit, ?????, and profit."

  13. Re:MIT by katana · · Score: 3, Funny
    Anyone else absolutely sick of MIT?

    Yes. Harvard.

  14. Want to know how? Just ask M$ by klipsch_gmx · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Microsoft has helped the Open source revolution happen.

    Look at the UI. Look at the applications. The basic look and feel hasn't changed significantly since 1995. Almost every new technology "innovation" has been either bought or copied (poorly) by Microsoft.

    OSS' growth has been more viral, more grassroots, more innovative than the top-down "we know better than you" approach that Microsoft has successfully imposed on its users in the last 5 years. It is with this suppression of innovation that Microsoft has directly spawned and contributed to the open-source revolution!

    On another note, after 10 years on Wintel, I switched to Macintosh recently. After 5 minutes inside of OSX, I experienced more innovation and creativity than I had on Windows for as long as I can recall.

    Thank-you Microsoft for helping me switch to truly useable applications.

  15. I guess I missed the "Open Source" part by Liquidrage · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I RTFA, but I did not RTFB.

    The article doesn't appear to anything more then talk of user feedback. Which really isn't open or closed source specific.

    For example FTFA:
    Boeing Co., for example, solicits feedback from its airline customers on new jumbo jet configurations and is heavily involved with its machine tool suppliers on the design of new production equipment. ''What you see is economic activity shifting to the side of use," von Hippel said.

    The medical example is similar. Passengers aren't using Boeing's Open Source Jet to modify their own. Instead, Boeing is *gasp* taking into account passenger feedback. Likewise, suppliers for Boeing are, *gasp*, listening to Boeing.

    The one part that gets into the area at least is:
    "The social efficiency of a system in which individual innovations are developed by individual users is increased if users somehow diffuse what they have developed to others,"

    Which I agree with. But the examples given weren't up that alley. Furthermore, I think a vast majority of organizations leverage software that is open source because it's free, not because they care for the source. I know we have pieces of OSS no one is *allowed* to touch. Ever. We didn't get it to modify, we got it because it worked. If we had to modify it we would'nt have used it. Of course, not everyone is in this situation. And not all OSS I have is like that. And that does leave us the choice, which is good even if now we don't touch it. But I think a vast majority of developer OSS use is Free Software they won't ever touch. I think the true use of the Source in Open Source is the exception, not the norm.

    The book might be more "Open Sourcey". I'll wait for the movie.

  16. Did any mod actually read the linked pdf paper? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    The pdf paper isn't particularly informative, in fact it's redundant because you can find most of the information on the web, and the business plan suggested in the paper is completely one dimensional and is based around total cost of ownership. Real world business models are way more complex. The ones written by Michael E. Porter for an example.

    Anyone thinking this is informative should gain some critical thinking and/or business skills.

    1. Re:Did any mod actually read the linked pdf paper? by siokaos · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This isn't a paper, it's notes from a presentation. A presentation for a writing class, you clod.

      --
      http://siokaos.org/
  17. Scratching an itch-Bleed a victum. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "Half the secret of encouraging innovation is just to stay out of the way. That's a lot easier with open source than with proprietary products."

    The other half is telling them "write it yourself" when they complain about the software. That too is easier with open source, compared to proprietary products.

    1. Re:Scratching an itch-Bleed a victum. by Dwonis · · Score: 3, Insightful
      The other half is telling them "write it yourself" when they complain about the software. That too is easier with open source, compared to proprietary products.

      Part of the reason for that is that any teenager can complain and make half-baked "suggestions", even if they barely have any idea of what they're talking about (written by Yours Truly over 4 years ago).

      I think if the "write it yourself" attitude completely disappeared, there would be no large open-source projects, because all the developers would burn out due to frustration. :-)

  18. What does "lead users" have to do with open source by aCapitalist · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The interview had nothing to do with open source.

    Proprietary software companies have been using usability studies, feedback systems, beta testers for a long time.

    Does anybody remember the whole Gnome/Eugenia/end-user flap? Or how about the bounty system that was rejected by KDE developers?

    There must be a big myth that open source end-users have more influence with open source projects. In fact, if they don't code they probably have less influence than with proprietary products because there is less of an incentive for a developer to bend his vision, since it's all about "scratching an itch" anyway.

    I'm not saying that developers don't listen, it's just that I don't see anything special about end-users of open source projects.

  19. Eric von Hippel's course at MIT by patiwat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Eric is a great teacher - I took a graduate course with him on Innovation Management (15.356) a few years ago. The course was recently renamed "How to Develop Breakthrough Products and Services" and is available via MIT's OpenCourseWare at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Sloan-School-of-Manageme nt/15-356Spring2004/CourseHome/index.htm. The course home page also gives a very brief overview of Eric's lead user concept. It's one of his pet ideas, and although it isn't the sole focus on the course, it certainly is one of the foundations.

    The actual class was wonderful: a mix of working scientists and R&D executives, Sloanies and other MIT grad students, and a couple of undergrads sitting in. Lots of student interaction and learning from your peers. The individual project was a good experience as well - I wrote a paper analyzing why Lockheed's X-33 space plane project failed, and what could have been done so that the the technologies developed (autonomous navigation and landing, composite materials, linear aerospike engines, metallic thermal protection system) didn't die with the project. Eric gave lots of guidance and advise on the analysis.

  20. The nature of the developers by hellfire · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's not limited to linux. I've seen several Mac and Windows programs that don't appear to have a lot of polish. Hell, my own company, who happens to have the largest market share of software sales within its niche isn't nearly as polished as some competitors.

    So many developers are either simply not experienced in proper structure, or proper GUI design, or they are under pressure by execs or marketing departments to get the project out the door. The important part of the software is does it do what it's supposed to do? Yes? Then ship it.

    The type of polish tends to differ. There are plenty of windows and mac apps with bad GUI, but it happens more in the Linux community because the body of developers don't have a deep background in coding GUI interfaces as to Mac or Windows developers. Windows programs tend to have more bugs but the windows environment provides a stable interface usually. Mac apps probably have the best of both worlds (as long as you agree the OS X interface is as good as the OS 9 interface).

    --

    "All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"

  21. Users Aren't Programmers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    And thus it's not generally possible for "individual innovations" to be "developed by individual users". Users may know what they want, but they have to translate their ideas through a programming team, and so the end user doesn't recally care if the source is open or not. They'll never see it.

    The one area where this statement is not true is where programmers happen to be the target audience -- that it, compilers, editors, operatings systems, and so on, plus some ancillary tools that programmers also find useful and interesting, such as web servers and three hundred IM clients. Oddly enough, most of the open source success stories are in just this category, while the success rate in other application areas is much lower.

  22. because they want to do it by Eternally+optimistic · · Score: 2, Funny

    Open source software is made by a bunch of people who actually want to do the work. Some of it turns out to be good. Perhaps it is not obvious to management types that people can do good work without threat of punishment.

    --
    What keeps me going is my inertia.
  23. Re:A New Business Model?-Everyone Happy? by EzInKy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    And you end up with KDE.

    And this is bad why? I can build KDE with as few or as many features as I want and configure the UI to my liking through an intuitive and easily accessible interface.

    --
    Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
  24. Re:Unless I read wrong... by Canberra+Bob · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Not true at all. How many times do we hear "well why dont YOU code it then?" That is not accepting user feedback.

    That was probably a bit of an extreme example but it is just not true to claim that open source accepts user feedback better than closed source software. User Acceptance Testing is a critical part of the commercial software development lifecycle, something that is sorely missing from open source development. This is a part of the SDLC that has resources allocated to it in commercial software, you say that in open source software it is done if the developer has nothing better to do. A preset budget v an afterthought, this is one instance where commercial software is better (yes I know I am generalising with 'commercial software' as there is much open source commercial software which also has rigorous UAT)

  25. Re:What does "lead users" have to do with open sou by benjamindees · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There must be a big myth that open source end-users have more influence with open source projects.

    There's more money in OSS than you think. Of course proprietary developers listen to their customers too, but to a lesser extent. The difference is, OSS providers can't hide behind lock-in file formats, obtrusive licenses, and established monopolies if they want to make money. They have to earn it, by listening to users and providing for their needs.

    And it's not as easy as a "usability study" would have you believe. It means living with users day in and day out and dealing with all of their problems, not just watching them click a few buttons for a couple of hours and optimizing the menus. A vast majority of the proprietary crap software wouldn't exist if all programmers were forced to then support it from the "hell desk". Fortunately for OSS, many developers *are* supporting end users directly, and code accordingly.

    --
    "I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
  26. Users as innovators by _ph1ux_ · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Of course users are innovators. There is no better person to tell you what would be better in an application or interface than people who use the software day-in and day-out.

    I am not talking about your average users though, like Grandma etc..

    I mean power users. For example, I am an expert at AutoCAD as I have been using it since its inception, and other CAD programs before that. By the time I was in highschool I was teaching other students how to use AutoCAD version 9.

    I have made many suggestions to autodesk based on my useage of their app. While I think its incredibly powerful, its only now begining to incorporate some useability "wishlist" items that have been desired for many many years.

    I will concede however, that many of these features require the maturity of the application and the savviness of the developers to reach a certain level before being implementable. I also feel that hardware needed to be there - such as good video cards.

    Finally, I also feel that we just have not "gotten it" yet with just about every interface. I have yet to use some interface that is entirely smooth and "intuitive" (functioning as I would desire it to function in a manner that feels entirely natural). This is a pretty obvious statement though, and I know that many applications have their shining points.

    As an example, there are aspects of AutoCAD that just kick ass over any other application ever used (by me) - and there are aspects of Softimage and Maya as well that are stunningly fluid, while others are exceedingly obtuse.

    If I were an application developer who was worth his salt, I would be seeking the most active users of my applications and solicite their feedback to a much greater degree than simply 'Focus Groups'...

    Hopefully, I am preaching to the choir.

    -phlux

  27. Re:ENOUGH ALREADY!!! by showardkid · · Score: 2, Insightful

    In truth, no one ever said Linux was for the faint of brain. It's about choice, and those who have no capacity or desire to learn and therefore to choose do not need to run Linux. It's those people that demand that their system work for THEM and not Microsoft or some other company that Linux is for.

    --
    Do, do not, or delegate to someone else: there is no try.
  28. Innovator toolkits - Innovation in Utility by empedocles · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I found the most interesting part of this article to be the idea of companies using toolkits to sow & gather innovation, deploying innovation-enabling toolkits and then drawing the resulting innovation back to you.

    Interesting because that's a method we're trying to develop here at BRINQ for use in the Base of the Pyramid, the designation for 4+ billion of the so-called "poor" living in the base of the global economic pyramid.

    The heart of our work is the belief that different cultures, different perspectives, lead to novel and unique innovations. So our focus is less on innovation in technology and more on what we were calling "innovation in utility", or the novel and unexpected ways in which people use technology. It takes very different capabilities than discovering innovation in a lab, aka it's the opposite of the Segway approach.

    Any ways, more or less the same idea as von Hippel's user centered innovation (or "market pull"), but focusing on the poor as a source of innovation. Definitely lots of challenges, but we believe the opportunities could be huge. Our primary focus is on toys too!

  29. I find it amusing.... by Ponzicar · · Score: 2, Funny

    that this professor is just one dyslexic capitalist away from being dubbed "Von Hippie".

  30. Re:SI units please: by Truth_Quark · · Score: 2, Funny
    I was really after the SI units for "attractiveness of innovation" and "lead-user-ness".

    The data was collected by a reference paper, but I do wonder what the international standard of lead-user-ness is. For the projects in the study lead-user-ness ranges from 5 to 14 on a continuous scale.

    I have felt for some time that "attractiveness" should be measured in Helen-of-Troys out of a possible maximum of 1000 ships - perhaps a supset of this scale could be used for "attractiveness of innovation". Maybe out of 1000 of those little wind-generators on the mast.

    The issus with this is the standardization of those little generators. If you use a modern, smaller one, you only get y = 1.32 + .23x - with smaller coefficients if you have a generator with solar capability.

  31. Double edged swords by MichaelPenne · · Score: 2, Interesting

    hmm, didn't they pretty much replace single edged swords?:-)

    there would be no special advantage of one company v.s. another to make an office suite that runs on it and the one that is truly less buggy and more feature rich and more secure is the one that ultimately wins.

    But that isn't how has to work, instead corps that use the software hire programmers to work on the software to keep making it better. Since the corp's business model is in using the software not in making the sofware, it's in the corp's advantage to keep improving it: then corps compete on the strength of their actual products while the software that enables their business model keeps getting more secure, more feature rich, etc. See Google's investment in Firefox, IBM's investment in PHP, etc. for example.

    More corp. IT $$ can then be freed from continually patching buggy software products and chasing down the damage they cause to improving the software and helping users learn to use it more effectively.

    There need be no net loss of programming jobs, in fact since we would all be involved in making better software (instead of just good enough for marketing to sell), most programmers would probably see a net improvement in their worth to their employers and their self worth.

  32. The 80-20 rule by syousef · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Basically it's boring and expensive and hard work to polish a product.

    If something is open source it's usually also free as in beer. It may take a hell of a lot of work to get it to the point where it's a good open source product. Unfortunately that last 20% of the work to polish it off takes 80% of the effort. Most of the time by the time you have a good product there's no one left willing to pay for it to be polished off. The developers themselves also lose interest: After all they could be making a small fortune doing something similar elsewhere, but they do it under the open source model for a variety of reasons - obviously they're usually more motivated by interest than money.

    --
    These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
  33. Redhat should have done that before Apple.. by xtal · · Score: 4, Interesting


    I often think about this very topic...if someone or someones would come along and put the pedal to the medal on polishing those things off, Linux would become one hell of a competitor.

    Redhat had enough money to do what apple did for BSD.. In a way, apple is the perfect company to put that polish on - it's what they do. I'm not sure there's a place anymore for a polished desktop UNIX the way there was a place for it in, say, 1997.

    It certainly is what Linux needs to smash onto the x86 desktop. People seem to get too caught up on Holy Wars (tm) to make this one happen though. Maybe I'm wrong - but I'm writing this on a powerbook, too, and in 1997 I was one of those point-and-laugh at mac types.

    --
    ..don't panic
  34. Re:A New Business Model?-Everyone Happy? by ozmanjusri · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Here's the "give'em what they want in action:

    "I want a car with tail fins!"

    http://www.openvms.org/ Vintage design, looks a bit strange, but still classy in its own way.

    "No I want a car with a bright pink paint job!"

    http://www.linspire.com/ It's a real Linux and seems to do the job, but it may be a bit soft compared to the trad distros. Looks a little like one of those "strange" OSs

    "I want a car that flies through the air, and swims underwater!"

    http://www.knoppix.com/ Frisbeed it at the cat. Dunked it in the sink. Dropped it into the CD drive and it still booted into Debian. Nice.

    "Foo to the others. I just want a basic car that goes from point A to Point B!"

    http://www.goosee.com/puppy/ This is one quick little puppy. Not much to it, but it goes like a train.

    "Nuts to the above. I want a car with a hot tub, and a wet bar, and plenty of space for all the women I'm going to get by driving this pimpmobile!".

    http://www1.mandrivalinux.com/en-us/ This sucker's big and fluffy. Has everything and the kitchen sink, and it'll look after you while you install it.

    --
    "I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
  35. Incentives by zotz · · Score: 2, Insightful

    One thought to ponder:

    The old way:

    Company owns product. Product lacks features. User suggests feature to implement. Company implements. Company owns users innovation and sells it to the user.

    The new way:

    Community owns product. Community member implements feature or suggests feature to implement and community implements feature. Community owns innovation and members benefit from it.

    That is in very simplified terms. But do you see how the old way might lack some incentive for a user to give his innovative ideas to the company only to have them own them and sell them back to him?

    all the best,

    drew

    --
    FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
  36. Re:Innovators? by eaglemoon · · Score: 2, Informative

    errrmmmmm...have you heard of Apache - I hear its a really good webserver or PHP - I hear its a great web scripting language or wait Perl - the duct tape of the Internet?

    Its real baloney when people say that open source is chasing tail lights. If you read the history of Unix - Salus has a good overivew - the users had a HUGE impact on how the system got developed and extended - and yes they were sharing source code then as well.

    You are just buying corporate marketing if you belive that open source is simply copying commerical company innovations.

    As von Hippel shows in his book - functionaly novel innovations come from users - and not from firms. Today user communities - as demonstrated by open source - are not just creating the innovations - but also making complete products out of them and then distributing and supporting them.

    --
    open what?