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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."
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.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.