What Business Can Learn from Open Source

dtolton writes "Paul Graham has written a fantastic article on what businesses can learn from Open Source. He covers why Amateurs can outperform Professionals, why the home is a better work environment than the office, and how bottom up ideas are better than top down. Finally he ties these lessons into the business relationship." Derived from a talk at Oscon 2005. From the article: "...the biggest thing business has to learn from open source is not about Linux or Firefox, but about the forces that produced them. Ultimately these will affect a lot more than what software you use. We may be able to get a fix on these underlying forces by triangulating from open source and blogging. As you've probably noticed, they have a lot in common."

Comments

Home ! Office

[Gothmolly]

The problem with the "I can be more productive at home" argument is that it blurs still further the distinction between work and personal life. IT people are already subject to odd-hours, psuedo or real on-call schedules, VPN access "just to check your email", etc.
People need to stop this trend - its not healthy. When I walk out the door of my job, I'm done. They pay me for 40 hours a week, and they get it. No more. If I work an extra 4 hours a week at home, I just gave myself a 10% pay cut.

Re:Home ! Office

[Freexe]

If you work an extra 4 hours a week, but safe $100 and 5-10 hours a week on travel. Plus get to see your family during the day, cook yourself a decent meal at lunch time and be in a more relaxed atmosphere, do you still class that as a pay cut?

Re:Home ! Office

[turlingdrome]

Quality of life has to be taken into consideration as part of compensation. If your quality of life improves significantly as a result of not having to commute into an office and play office politics, this can be worth a good sum of money to many people.

Re:Home ! Office

[D-Cypell]

They pay me for 40 hours a week, and they get it. No more.

Which is great until your employer finds someone who is prepared to work 60 hour weeks for the same money.

The quality of you work may be far higher, but many employers dont recognise quality the same way that you and I may. Mainly because quantity is a much easier thing to measure and place on fancy looking spreadsheets.

Re:Home ! Office

[aussie_a]

But I must be an exception...

Getting a job is easier then getting a job you like AND can support your family on (both financially and mentally). I wouldn't say you're an exception, but I think it's safe to say there are plenty of people who aren't in your circumstance.

Working at home, doing overtime for "fun", etc do suit those who have their dream job. But for the rest, this expectation would be a nightmare. And no, getting your dream job isn't possible for everyone. But for those who do have it, I envy them.

Re:Home ! Office

[samjam]

You raise a good point.

Some bosses want "work", some bosses want "results".

My boss wants "results" and gets them. They are ingenious results and he wouldn't get these from someone whose qualification was merely being willing to work 60 hours a week for the same pay.

I get my results Feynman style by thinking, walking around and trying things out, by reading slashdot and freshmeat and seeing whats going on.

I work for a small company, I think it makes a difference.

Sam

Re:Home ! Office

[An Onerous Coward]

You seriously didn't have time to read the article, did you? The part about working from home was just one part of a much larger solution, and without bringing the rest of it along, working at home just takes you from a bad face-to-face relationship to a bad long-distance relationship.

The problem is, you have a job where you're doing things you wouldn't do unless you were paid for it. Because of this, employers try to make you efficient by setting up your workplace so as to make it unconducive for anything enjoyable. People hold meetings so that they can look busy. Productivity plummets.

Yes, it's unhealthy when work starts creeping into non-work time. But that's because most people consider their jobs to be soul-sucking drudgery. If you really enjoy what you do, you don't have to draw a sharp, 40 hour line in the sand, or consider a few extra hours to be time deducted from your real life.

Anyways, the point is that the article isn't just suggesting "working from home", but is suggesting a wide variety of options for reworking the currently wasteful and sterile employer/employee relationship into something both more productive and fulfilling for both.

Re:Home ! Office

[constantnormal]

It all depends on what kind of "work" office you have. If you're crammed into a cube with 3 other occupants (and I've seen & endured far worse), with 4 sets of phones, beepers, guests intruding on your concentration, then maybe a "home" office would work better for you.

If your "home" office is not exactly a fortress of solitude, such that you can't get work done there due to the distractions of phone, kids, or any of a number of other things that can break you out of work mode, then maybe an away-from-home work environment will work better for you.

If neither a place of business or your home is conducive to work from, you need to find/make a place that is.

Re:Home ! Office

[Malyven]

If your wife has never yelled at you over the phone in the office you obviously haven't been married that long. All this would do is reverse it, and I don't know about you but I would much rather look at my wife while she is yelling at me and my boss is yelling in the phone than vice versa.

Re:Home ! Office

[Nevyn]

Yeh, I think that's the main point the above posters have missed. If you normally "work" at a seperate location, then trying to work at home is going to be a bad experience ... much like the couple of times a year I have to goto an office, my chair; desk; computer; everything is wrong.

The same with the "I only work 40 hrs a week, so don't work at home" reply ... sure, so do I (on average), but I never do 40 hours by working 9-5, 5 days a week, with an hour for lunch -- in other words, being able to work 1-3am is only a benifit if it means you can not work 1-3pm.

Blogging similar to open source?

[Recovering Hater]

Or Open Source similar to blogging? I just saw that and my vision went blurry... Blogs are just web pages that people update everyday or so... WTF!? BLOG!? I hate that word. It's just stupid.

Not quite

[DogDude]

This group of technical professionals are doing a hobby they enjoy. That's it. It really doesn't have anything to do with work. Would you like to explain how somebody who works in, say, insurance could be more inspired by his employer, given that his hobby is model trains? What they do on their own time is completely unrelated to work.

Middle Ground

[SolarCanine]

As the author of TFA states, changes to our cultural ideas of "how things get done" are indeed glacial. But that's no reason that business in the 21st Century can't take a couple small steps in the right direction.

I have been lucky enough in the past to work for a forward-thinking company that understood that allowing their employees to follow the threads of their own ideas could be enormously profitable overall to the company. Job descriptions are far too restrictive, IMHO, and should only be used as base guidelines. This is not to say that management should push employees outside of the job description and expect more, but that they should allow and encourage employees to explore new methods and ideas.

I've written quite a bit of software over the years for employers with this "Go ahead, give it a try" mindset -- software that was completely off the track of what I was actually "hired to do." Yes, I did my job, but by allowing my job to morph as my interests drove it, the company ultimately ended up with new products and services to offer that they hadn't envisaged. I was paid well for the work that I'd prefer to be doing, and everyone was happy on both sides of the equation.

So, managers of the world, loosen the grip on the reins a bit. Let a little entropy into the system and see what gets produced...

Put more accurately...

[Dasher42]

why Amateurs can outperform Professionals

I think the article and the facts on the ground would justify rephrasing this as "why professional programmers get better results on their free time, without pointyhairs, committees, and marketing droids in their way".

Re:Put more accurately...

[Shotgun]

Amateurs 'can' always outperform Professionals.

The Amateur only has to make a product.
The Professional also has to make a living.

Re:Big assumption

[SolarCanine]

Actually, one of the most liberal-minded companies I've ever done work for had under 100 employees. But they understood that allowing me some flexibility paid off in the long run. And, to be quite honest, I ended up putting in more than 40 hours a week because of it. Overall, I'd say they came out way ahead compared to trying to turn me into one of the masses who feel like watching clocks and rushing the parking lot are the norm.

Sounds like the attitude of someone...

[brunes69]

..who hates their job.

I enjoy coding, and the stuff I code at work is very interesting and challenging. When I was unemployed for 6 months 2 years ago, guess what I did with my free time - code!

You think professional golfers just quit at the end of the tournament and say tripe like "if I golf 10 hours in my free time, I just got a 10% paycut!"

Have fun hating your job, working the bare minimum, and never getting ahead. Meanwhile I will keep enjoying my job, getting ahead, and when I am 45 I will be sipping on a margarita in the bahamas while you are still working 40 hours a week to make rent.

Re:Sounds like the attitude of someone...

[HairyCanary]

If you think working hard will get you ahead, then you have not been working in corporate America. Kissing ass, schmoozing, and making friends is how you get ahead. The old saying, "It's not WHAT you know, it's WHO you know" is very true.

Hating your job may not be the right answer, but either is being an overachiever. See your job for what it is -- a means to an end. Work your 40 hours a week, make sure you go out for beer regularly with the boss, and watch your career advance.

Re:Sounds like the attitude of someone...

[Anonymous Coward]

More like someone who has the right priorities.

I also like the work I do (some sysadmin, some coding) and I tend to do that in my free time, too. But what I do at work is for my boss and what I do at home is for me and I don't mix the two. I also have interests other than writing code. Blurring the line between when work ends and when personal time starts just encourages employers to pile more work on without regard to your personal time.

As for your crack about getting ahead, I have the same 40-hours-and-no-more attitude as the gp poster, and in the 5 years that I have had this job I have received 2 promotions and more than doubled my salary. I'm financially comfortable and I'm only 31. If you have a job that requires you to work 40+ hours a week just to be comfortable when your 45 then it doesn't sound like much of a job to me.

So have fun giving your employer all of your free time so that you can get ahead. I'll continue to get ahead just fine while I'm out playing golf.

Re:Sounds like the attitude of someone...

[FunWithHeadlines]

Amen. I also work hard while at work, and then do similar activities at home for myself because I love what I do. But I absolutely do not work extra hours, nor do I think about work when I am at home. I learned long ago to separate my lives. I still get my work done plenty early and of good quality.

It has been my observation that people who habitually work extra hours (that is, not those on the occasional project crunch time) fall into these four categories, and ONLY these four categories:

1. Young and inexperienced and don't yet know they are doing more harm than good to their careers by a) starting down the path of burnout; and b) telling management it is OK to exploit them.
2. Workaholics who can't stop, and who are miserable if they aren't working.
3. People who do not know how to manage their time properly, and thus need to work extra to get done what the rest of us get done in 40 hours.
4. People who are given too much work for the time allotted, thereby indicating a failure of management.

Don't count the pros out.

[DingerX]

Yeah, but the best open source products have people involved who are paid for their time in working on it.

Amateurs are great, and amateur drive is an amazing thing -- it's enabled me to produce software of a quality and sophistication that a "professional operation" couldn't match for anywhere near the price.

But the "great advantage" of amateurs -- they work better at projects they love, without bosses -- is also their great shortcoming. As a rule, amateurs don't do the crap work. Most amateurs, being their own bosses, won't do, or do inadequately the pain-in-the-ass parts of the job. Check grammar on a weblog? Make the GUI useful and intuitive to an average user? Hang around and get the damn thing finished? Ensure that your startup has a legally sound foundation?

In short, discipline is something amateurs as a group lack, and that's something some of those fancy degrees teach : to achieve something, you can't just do the stuff you like.

As far as meetings go, well sure, meetings are to be abhorred by any sensible person. That's also why in Universities (where you get your fancy degrees) we teach people to break up in arbitrary small groups and work on a project. The smart ones figure out pretty quick that small group work sucks and determine to avoid such situations, or make them as functional as possible.

And well, yeah, it sucks being a wage slave, but most jobs are just that: jobs, and for lazy-ass amateurs like me to live our lives, we need an infrastructure of people who work for a living.

Re:As a small business owner

[SolarCanine]

I've found that this is a particularly bad problem when it comes to software development. Most American developers lack the maturity and responsibility to be allowed to "work from home".

Really? Hm. I'd have to say that if I have employees that I feel it necessary to watch their every working moment to make sure they're working, there is most likely a major problem with my hiring process, since I'm obviously grabbing the least-trustworthy schmoes I can find.

code permanence is the key

[RealityProphet]

It is not that open source software can outperform professionally-written software. It is most often the case that a piece of nice commercial software is written and the open source community tries to replicate it for free. The reason that they can come up with so many quality, open source alternatives is because they have no timeline. Nobody bats an eye that it took the open source community 5 years to come up with a competitor to IE6. Nobody cares about that (it's free, after all, quit complaining!).

Rather, it is the case that code that is well written, only needs to be written once. Take the gecko rendering engine, for instance. How many open source browsers use it? And once a quality piece of core software is written, it doesn't need to be written again! So, it may take the open source community years to come up with a solution, but once it's there, it isn't going anywhere.

You can see this happening with kde and gnome, too. They aren't quite as user-friendly or as stable as their commercial counterparts, but once they get there, unless the desktop paradigm changes, then the OSS community will have their free desktop alternative.

Why amateurs outperform professionals

[Linus Torvaalds]

The first reason is that many, many businesses are focused on building what the customers ask for. Clue number one: customers know fuck all about building software. If they were remotely clued in, they wouldn't need to ask somebody else to build it, would they?

So customers ask for stupid things. That's what makes them customers. The problem arises when the business doesn't care that it's stupid, but builds it for them anyway. Now you have a suboptimal solution that cost lots of money.

Compare this with the amateurs. They are building it for themselves, so they are qualified on both the problem domain and the software construction. They aren't going to build something stupid because they are going to be the ones using it.

Then there's the morale. The professionals are fully aware that what they are building is stupid. It's demoralising. They offer sensible solutions instead, but get knocked back with "it's not what the customer asked for". They begin to understand that their job isn't to build good software, it's to spend their time programming, and if the result is somewhat functional when they reach the deadline, that's just a bonus. It's not surprising that they don't really give a shit whether the code is up to scratch or not, because the whole exercise is pointless beyond collecting a paycheck.

Again, compare with the amateurs. They get satisfaction not only from using the software they wrote (being both users and developers simultaneously), but they get the satisfaction from finding that others appreciate it too. They know they've solved a problem well, and they take pride in their work. People who take pride in their work generally put in more effort.

If there's anything that businesses can learn from this, it's that they need to be able to say no to customers. To put off deadlines. To say "You know what? This is solving the wrong problem!" and go back to the drawing board with the customers to figure out a better approach. It's only when the professional programmers see that they are actually doing something productive that they'll feel motivated enough to take pride in their work, and feel like they are in an environment where they can contribute actual solutions instead of banging their head against a brick wall.

Re:Scary

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not so much the evils of corporate profit so much as the evils of technological progress. Farmers have lost their income, so have factory workers, along with script monks (1600, printing...).

Every time paople scream that the world will end, but it never does, it just adapts.

If open source cost's me my current job as a developper, so be it, I'll find another way to pay my rent.

But that won't change the fact that in my spare time, I'll still be helping out on projects and chatting with other developpers on IRC.

Gee

[Synli]

by triangulating from open source and blogging. As you've probably noticed, they have a lot in common This is the most irritating comment I've read in a long time. Blogging has nothing in common with open source, except for it is one of the things that are now considered cool even by mainstream media. Apart from being currently "in", they have nothing in common.

Re:Startups "won't hurt as much?"

[pjkundert]

I think you perhaps misunderstand Mr. Graham. Yes, failing at your own business won't hurt as much as being a failure, working at a job.

As someone who invested 6 years, and about $250,000 worth of lost earning potential into a business, I can honestly say that I agree with him, 100%.

I wouldn't trade my experience running that business for that $250,000, if you tried to give me the cash. Now that I am back at a programming "Job", I treat it completely differently than I did before I had a business. I find that I worry much less, too -- once you've come close to living in a gutter, there's not much that is "threatening" about a boss!

He does say that someone with Kids and a Mortgage should think twice. So, all in all, Mr. Graham's article was very even-handed in its comparison of Jobs vs. Start-ups.

Re:Scary

[UtucXul]

So far, there are only two companies that will even claim to have made a profit from open source. They are IBM, who may have reason to fudge the numbers, and Red Hat, who claims to have scraped some skin from its teeth. All the others are either losing money or folding.

Is that really a fair thing to say? Apple has used a ton of open source programs for OSX (even though the final product also contains lots of non-free stuff). And they have made money.

Google uses Linux which is free to make money. Tivo use Linux (although I don't know if they actually make money. Linksys sells (and I assume does pretty well) products like the WRT54g which run Linux.

I don't want to go crazy with examples, but the point is that lots of companies make money off of free software and some of them probably even give things back, they just don't always make money the way you expect a software company would.

I gotta agree with you

[Anonymous Coward]

"He covers why Amateurs can outperform Professionals"

This is total bullshit.

Perhaps he covers why motivated people outperform unmotivated people. Just because you don't get paid for you craft, does not mean you are not a professional.

Paul Graham: Great Hacker, Crappy Economist

[Phemur]

While Paul Graham may have incredible hacking skills, his writings about business leave much to be desired.

In his latest essay, he tries to explain why a Professional will never be as productive as an Amateur because Professionals don't do what they like. Excuse me? So you're saying amateur athletes players are better than people in the NBA/NHL/MLB/NFL because they'll play for free? That's absolutely ridiculous. Professional athletes are more motivated than anyone else. What about people who actually applied for jobs doing work they loved, like me. Not only do I have a job I love, I get paid to do it.

I'm certain there are people who hate their jobs, and who are very unproductive. But has Paul ever considered the fact that maybe they were unmotivated to begin with, and that the reason they took that job was because they were too unmotivated to get anything else?

A previous posted stated that motivation is what drives productivity. I couldn't agree more. Money has absolutely nothing to do with productivity, it's all about motivation.

Phemur

Re:Why you're full of crap

[Linus Torvaalds]

Customers often times have no clue as to what they need (and therefore the requirements that the design and implementation flow from are flawed/wrong) and this can caues issues. However, this has less of an effect on whether or not the code is "up to scratch".

Perhaps you misunderstand me. I'm not saying that bad requirements directly cause bad code. I'm saying that programmers who know they are building the wrong thing are going to find it difficult to care enough to create high-quality code.

Re: Agreed

[Anonymous Coward]

The author seems to portray that startups have a high chance of attaining google-like fate. This is a bit ambitious. Startup requires money and financial backing and most graduate students have neither. If the startup fails, you may not feel that bad;atleast you had fun working on that project. Too bad your credit-card company will not feel the same way!.Also, how many startups have actually survived more than a couple of years?

I believe amateurs are creators, but professionals drive the industry. Being on time, following rules and other "plague" of professional life is necessary for sane life. Imagine if your plumber refused to come and fix the problem because he/she "don't feel like it"!. However, I do agree that office environment degrade productivity. I am a full-time employee at a large corporation. I have seen people taking up days doing work that I could have finished in a few hours. In my opinion, traditional offices are a workplace for tired and burnt-out, or for those who are inline to achieve this status. But, the cold, hard reality is that you need money to live, and people will rarely pay you to have fun!

These are one of the reasons open-source has thrived. It lets you have the best of both worlds.

"the home is a better work environment"

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

"the home is a better work environment than the office"

The author must not have a wife or kids.

Re:Scary

[Donny Smith]

>Is that really a fair thing to say?

It's not, but for different reasons (in my view). IBM, in my view, is selling snake oil (give you a "free" Linux, then rip you off on everything else). Red Hat is probably the only noteworthy example.

Tivo is making money not from Linux but from their product (which incidentally runs on Linux), but could have made money using any other OS (BSD or even some commercial embedded OS).
The same goes for Google (just look at Yahoo - I think they're big on *BSD).

I think making money on open source is one thing and using open source components in one's product/service is another.

Also, note that some of Red Hat's best-selling and money-making products used to be closed source. They're giving them away now (and they've become GPL/OSS in the meantime) in exchange for maintenance. If the development doesn't pick up properly, these will dry up. As far as the OS is concerned, their best hope is that Linuces remain fucked up as they are right now so companies get locked in their enterprise distro.

And then there's Fedora and other communities who work for Red Hat for free.

Re:As a small business owner

[YrWrstNtmr]

If I have you in a cubicle, I can look over your shoulder and make certain that you are working

If you 'look over my shoulder' more than one time a week, you and I have a problem.

I can track how you're spending your time and if you're ripping me off I'll know it.

As a manager/boss, you should be able to tell that up front.
"This will take me X days to finish"
"OK"
-here, you, the boss, should be able to determine if 'X' is reasonable. If I say it'll take 80 hours, and you KNOW it should only take me 20...then there needs to be a meeting of the minds. If you also realize that it will take 80 hours....then by next friday, I should hand you a completed whatever. Or a valid reason why it isn't done.

If you don't know WHY something should take 80 hrs vs 20 hrs, maybe you shouldn't be the boss.

It's only "fantastic" if you...

[fitten]

Paul Graham has written a fantastic article...

This article is only "fantastic" if you are already a "true believer" in what he's already saying. At that point, you are just looking for others to help you validate your own beliefs.

His second paragraph, for example:

More significant, I think, is which 52% they are. At this point, anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon don't.

Is completely religious. What Google, Yahoo, and Amazon know about their business and why their choices work for them may have zero bearing on what servers YOU need for YOUR work. For example, there may be applications (even legacy ones) that run on some other OS (doesn't have to be Windows) where the application is not OSS and is not available on an OSS OS? I personally know someone who has a bunch of software that he wrote running his own business (quite well, I might add) that is written in a language that he can't find in OSS much less on Linux. Why change? Why would any of those three companies know more about his business than he does? Why would he have to justify his decisions to, well, anyone?

Basically, this article is great if you are already part of the OSS religion. If you view OSS as "just another tool that you can use" then the article is somewhat "meh". Besides, the author doesn't even take into account any other businesses that aren't electronic in nature, such as manufacturing (yeah, you want a bunch of amateurs spread out all over the world trying to assemble cars? the shipping costs of the required parts for one car to all the workers (and back and forth) would cost 10x the amount that a car on the lot today would cost). Yet, the author doesn't make any distinction (perhaps saying that his "research" only applies to businesses that do all of their business online and are basically just information or retailers). Maybe he doesn't realize that there are other businesses out there...

Home is not a better environment!!!

[Locke2005]

I have a 4-year old. Trust me, I get far, far fewer interruptions when working at the office than when working at home!

Re:As a small business owner

[Todd Knarr]

What if you tell me that a particular task takes 80 hours, but in reality it takes you only 20? I have no way of knowing that I'm wasting 60 hours!

You're trusting me to create the software that's going to determine whether your business succeeds or fails, but you don't trust me to be honest with you about schedules? I think you've got a more fundamental problem, then. Either you can't trust me period, or your expectations on schedules are out of line with reality and nothing can be done until you correct your expectations. Oddly, I've found the latter to be far more often the case (this was in fact the primary reason I changed jobs earlier this year).

If I have you in a cubicle, I can look over your shoulder and make certain that you are working, I can monitor your browsing, check for personal emails, etc - in other words, I can track how you're spending your time and if you're ripping me off I'll know it.

And why do you need to do this? You hired me to do a job. Either I'm turning in the results on time and to spec or I'm not. If I'm not, you might need to watch me closer to figure out why. But if I'm finishing my projects on time and my schedules are reasonable, why should you need to confirm that I'm doing what I'm obviously doing?

I think the lack of maturity here isn't on the developers' side. I've found most commonly that managers lack the maturity to trust highly-paid professionals to simply do their job unless and until there's evidence they aren't.