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

[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

[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.

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.

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.

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: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.

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.

"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.