Users as Innovators - Why Open Source Works

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."

Comments

Open Source Presentation

[siokaos]

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

Polish

[mr. marbles]

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?

Re:Polish

[Bastian]

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.

Re:Problem

[NanoGator]

"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!

Re:Problem

[NanoGator]

"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.