Slashdot Mirror
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."
One thing that businesses can learn from open source is that properly motivated employees can produce great things. Here we have a group of technical professionals working for free to produce great software. Employers on the other hand, have a difficult time motivating people who they pay. Motivation == productivity.
Well, as this may be true for you, I just like my job. I can wake up in the morning before my wakeup alarm starts, and jump out of bed, thinking "wow I wish I already was at my desk, so I can continue what I was doing yesterday". Yes I have flexible hours and can start whenever I want. Yes I work too much each and every day. No I don't get paid more because of this. But most important: No I don't mind doing this, I even like it. But I must be an exception...
int main(void) {while(1) fork(); return 0;}
There'sa lot of people in the open source community who work with motivation and fun. That's the key in my opinion.
If the great industries care about his employees, they should be a lot more productive
Codexcast, the first Spanish podcast in the world made in High-Resolution parchment. (I think so
This guy is really insulting. He says that failing your own business "won't hurt as much." as having a real job? To say that investing every dime you own in a business, and spending every day for several years (most businesses fold in the 1-3 year range), only to see it fail "won't hurt as much" as working as a job that may not be 100% rewarding is pure bullshit.
Actually, I'd say it's this cavalier attitude about business that causes many startups to fail.
It sounds like he's suggesting that developers work at home, develop open source, and pay their rent with what? fairy dust? good will?
Another thing that keeps people away from starting startups is the risk. Someone with kids and a mortgage should think twice before doing it. But most young hackers have neither.
And as the example of open source and blogging suggests, you'll enjoy it more, even if you fail. You'll be working on your own thing, instead of going to some office and doing what you're told. There may be more pain in your own company, but it won't hurt as much.
I don't respond to AC's.
I think the important part of OSS is that teams are built on individuals' technical ability rather than race, creed, colour or indeed paymaster.
rd
His opinion, while interesting, is incredibly naive. It's great that there was recently a posting about the spread between "good" programmers and "average" programmers. Much of what the author talks about represents an incredibly small portion of the overall developer community. While there may be some people that would flourish being given freedom to work from home on a project that they found interesting, the fact is, those types of projects are fairly uncommon (the real challenge is to take the "mundane" project and make it interesting) as is the person who would actually benefit from this. Let's face it, the majority of developers would not see a similar leap in productivity. They might enjoy their lives more, but it certainly would not relate to higher productivity.
The author mentions that M$ can't motivate its IE programming staff to come out with a "better" browser than FireFox. Well, discounting things like dealing with the codebase you have inherited, lets face it, M$ operates by putting their A Team resources where they perceive they are needed the most. Right now, they kick butt in the browser wars (even against "better" competition), so there isn't a perceived need to "have to come out with something significantly better". OTOH, the FireFox team does nothing but produce a browser (kinda), so of course they HAVE to be better. Would a new browser that was only "just as good", or even "not quite as good" been acceptable for the FF team, obviously not. So to assume that the quality of software coming from both sides has more to do with amateur developers vs non motivated professional developers is simply not looking at the bigger picture.
It's crap anyway. When I work at home, I'm not as productive as when I'm at the office. If I need to put in more than forty hours, I go back to the office on saturday.
Anything else, and I end up time sharing between working and fragging...One day I'd get teamspeak confused with my hands-free phone and call my boss a spawn camping n00b lamer, and that would be it.
I'll tell ya though, I hated being freelance. There was no "at work" and no "off work" there was just work, and everytime I sat in front of the computer it would reproach me.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Some people live to work.
Others work to live.
I learned some time ago that one group has a hard time understanding the motivations of the other.
Distinction between work and personal life is a very fresh concept, connected with capitalism and work for hire. As someone already mentioned it does not exist if you run a restaurant. It doesn't exist if you are a farmer. Hell, it probably doesn't exist if you run any kind of private small-scale businness.
It didn't exist in pre-capitalism era: families worked together, dined together. Even if you were hired, quite often your brother/sister worked at the same place. Women were taking their babies to work or were gathering together to spin wool or linen, to sew and so on.
So it seems that this distinction was artificial and caused by a fact that if some people have to be in the same physical location to work and they have to commute - it is more efficient to separate their work time and leisure time. But with introduction of modern communication methods more and more jobs take different trend: work at home, feel comfortable, manage your time yourself, your employer is only interested in results, not means. And this means switch from time based work to task based work - which in fact is a return to natural state.
Wouldn't you like to spend your day at home, with your family, just retreating to your home office if you need to focus a bit more on work, have a lunch at home with your wife and kids than to commute everyday, order a pizza for lunch, and then spend an hour and a half driving back home? Do you like explaining to your boss that you have to take a day-off because of some reconstruction in your house or something?
With a laptop I can do my work while laying on my sofa and listening to my favourite music on my home stereo - and that is when I am really productive.
Cheers
Raf
If there's anything business tends to learn, for a combination of reasons which do include constant onslaught from those who are reflexively anti-business (attack and your enemy defends, it is easier to influence friends than defeat enemies), it is to do things as cheaply as possible.
Coders have as much right as anyone else to be paid for their work. Oh, but here comes Free Open Source Software. Legions of geeks willing to write all sorts of code you find useful and you can use it in your business. They want you to. Who needs to pay coders' relatively large salaries now? Now you have a cudgel in the fight against giving the coders the pay they want and feel they deserve. Why pay $60K/year to someone writing in-house apps when you can pay some geek who couldn't maintain a job at Dairy Queen but who has really good Linux skills half that?
THAT is what business learns from FOSS. And all OSS is FOSS in the minds of the majority of the OSS using and writing world. It certainly is in business. A way just needs to be found to insure that is is FOSS.
The socialistic and chintzy anti-corporate "free, free, free" brigades and the corporate "closed source if we can help it, open source if we pay nothing" people need to call a truce and establish a way that coding can be open to future learning from it without denying fair IP to anyone or making it hard to earn money from your labors or for those who are not in OSS. Corporations will always make money. If it is not handled right, then they will be the only ones making money and those doing the programming will make little to none. All because of blind fanaticism, inability to see the forest for the trees, and unwillingness to do what is needed in the way of compromise and different approaches to the conflict.
Not for nothing my day job isn't programming or supporting same anymore.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
I used to go to the office on Saturday too. It was my most productive time, since there were no interupptions from coworkers.
Now I work from home, and every day is like that.
Any kind of work can suck. Therefore, group project work can suck. But it can also rock. While there are some random elements nudging such work on the sucks/rocks continuum, I think the majority of it is systematic. That is, it sucks or rocks in direct proportion to your own actions within such groups.
Notice that I didn't say "in direct proportion to the actions of all the people within such groups." You -- each and every individual -- has the capability to turn pretty much any group into a functioning group.
The fact of the matter is that most people are poor at interacting in group work -- that is, maximizing their own potential within the group, and maximizing the potential of the group.
Everyone pines to end up on the team in which, by luck, everyone gets along well and works hard and competently and things just end up going great. (I think this usually happens in the context of self-selected groups with high barriers to entry; I'll give an example of this that I've seen recently later.) These teams happen, but rarely. You're a sucker to wait for such things to happen. Make the team work.
To try to put this all in context, I'll provide a few examples here that I've experienced in the realms of university, working life and Open Source projects, and also tag on a few academic references at the bottom.
My undergraduate degree was astronomy. (Undergraduate astronomy is basically an amalgam of compsci, physics and applied maths.) Group work was mandatory in that program simply because the problem sets (with about 2 due a week) were far too big and difficult for any of us to regularly be able to individually complete. So we did a lot of group meetings to work out the problems. Sometimes they were "sharing" meetings, where we'd each get a question or two on our own and bring them all together in the end, hopefully with enough time left over for each to present a mini-lecture on the thought processes that led to the solution (without which you'd be pretty much toast when the same kind of question appeared on an exam), but occasionally a problem would be too difficult for any of us to solve individually and we'd have to group-work a single problem together. (Or maybe get it from the notes of someone a year or two ahead of us. :-) ) This
worked out pretty well, but this is probably an example of people who
are naturally hard working and intelligent self-selecting themselves
into the group. (You don't take undergrad astrononmy by accident,
after all.)
Fast forward 7 years... and now I'm in a top-tier MBA program. The differences between the programs are enormous. There are 330 people in my year, not 8. People come from a wide variety of backgrounds and there is a wide variety of skills, both kinds of skill and amounts of skill. Group work is built into the program at a dozen different levels rather than just being something that happens "by accident." We don't have 4 years to get to know each other and learn how to work with each other (and build up levels of trust and game-theoretic dynamics): some groups are meant to last for several months, others for several hours. And guess what -- they all worked out great. Sure, there was an occasional slacker (be it for reasons of disposition, or because they had a death in the family so they had to run off for personal reasons, thus leaving the rest of us to pick up their slack), but it didn't happen all that often and it was never anything that the rest of us couldn't reasonably absorb. With pretty much every group project my teams managed to find a way to make things work ou