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Unusual Open Source
Dumitru Erhan writes "The Economist has a special report on open-source. It analyzes the way open-source projects succeed and finds that a rigid, business-like organizational structure is of vital importance to the quality of the final product. It cites Firefox, MySQL and (more recently) Wikipedia as examples of projects that do not simply allow anarchy to rein in, but which have 'real checks and balances, and real leadership taking place'. There is also a discussion of open-source methods being applied to non-software projects." From the article: "Constant self-policing is required to ensure its quality. This lesson was brought home to Wikipedia last December, after a former American newspaper editor lambasted it for an entry about himself that had been written by a prankster. His denunciations spoke for many, who question how something built by the wisdom of crowds can become anything other than mob rule."
Isn't that how people get elected?
Oh, I see what he means now.
Wikipedia is what it is today because of the large amount of people who care about it enough to fix vandalism. Not necessarily because of a centralized leadership.
Open source is successful because of the large number of people who have an interst in its success. Centralizing leadership might be helpful in some way, but I don't see it as the most important thing.
Regardless of the resier4 and other fiascos, does the kernel not serve as an example of a sound organizational structure? Linus is kinda relevant to Linux, I contend.
Many people still don't take the GNU project seriously. People often find it easier to keep their eyes shut than to have to change their beliefs in light of what they see.
I've shown people incredible stuff on my (Linux) PC, but often when they find out it doesn't run on Windows they continue to pretend it doesn't exist.
Good advertisement for your mag mates.
... pulled ... in that there is a need for them... Traditional software is ... pushed ... in that there's a need for profit.
You see, one thing economists (and many, many others) get wrong time and time again, is self organisation... They just don't get it for some reason. The "bazaar" encourages, promotes lots of projects, lots of errors, lots of iterations, lots of dead projects and we get emergent behaviour out of that environment. These are projects which are strong, robust and evolutionary in that they will fill all of the niches in which they are needed. These projects are
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It's strange that the findings turn out this way, because to judge by Eric S. Raymond's presentation of the open source idea in his influential The Cathedral and the Bazaar one gets the idea that hierarchies and control are bad and that anarchy is the most fruitful situation. Certainly the most well-known example of open-source, Mozilla, only got tied up for years due to its exclusivist design system.
So, if you define sucess as having a big reachable community, the sucessfull projects will have someone able to tell you the name of every developer. If you define sucess as being used by corporations, the sucessfull projects look like corporation projects.
Now, we could get the first page with some more truisms, or we could forget about generalising this idea of "sucess" to an area where there is simply no metric to be used.
Rethinking email
It's obvious that an entry created and commented on by many disinterested people is less biased than an entry created and commented on by few. Traditional encylopedias fall in the latter category, Wikipedia falls in the former. But people are not always disinterested, and that's where the problems lie. So the real problem is: are all the participants disinterested? With traditional encylopedias, the chances are that most writers are semi-disinterested observers, as they are ordered to write about subjects, they don't select them themselves. With Wikipedia, people self-select themselves, which means they cannot be disinterested, by definition. And that's the reason that some kind of community control is required for projects like this.
'real checks and balances, and real leadership taking place'
"Constant self-policing is required to ensure its quality.
Any task envisioning an end product could be said to require the characteristics mentioned above. What may be of more importance is that the venerable 'Economist'(although I believe its always been seen as left leaning) is making an effort to wrap its mind around Open Source and in doing so allowing its readers to follow suit.
Over the last year plus I've noticed more articles that tend to view Open Source projects as akin to 'hardnosed' business methods. I think they represent the establishment coming to a positive consensus about Open Source methods and projects.
I noticed a turn in the way the general business community reported and interacted with Open Source from about the time IBM ran the ads picturing Linux as a small, blonde haired, blue eyed wonderkid.
The old boy network isn't about to let Open Source join the club but they're certainly ready to let it in the service entrance.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Well, it's an oversimplification.
OpenBSD definitely shows an emphasis on correctness over features.
FreeBSD and NetBSD have different goals.
That said, all three of them are wonderful projects. It's the licensing, not the professionalism or code quality or any other technical concern, that keeps them from being competitive with linux for mindshare.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
In theory I agree...but my limited experience as a Wikipedia editor suggests that this isn't true. There may be no one overall guiding hand - with 1,000,000+ articles in English alone how could there be? - but I suspect a lot of areas have one or more guardians who watch closely over their areas of expertise.
The price of Wikipedia is eternal vigilance
"For example, it lacks ways of ensuring quality and it is still working out better ways to handle intellectual property."
Then later, "With software, for instance, the code is written chiefly not by volunteers, but by employees sponsored for their efforts by companies that think they will in some way benefit from the project."
Jesus. There must be a host of FOSS projects which were highly successful, but never involved with a company or corporate sponsorship.
Does the Linux kernel itself fall under that category? At least for most of its history? And in fact is it the same thing to say that some "volunteers" are paid to do their work, and that therefore this is an indication of FOSS having to adopt "cathedral" management styles in order for its projects to succeed?
What about all the FOSS network tools, Snort, Nmap, and the like? Were those all sponsored by corporate interests?
Is it anything more than a red herring to say that FOSS software-production leaders actually must be able to manage?
Any Project whether it's open source or commercial needs this to succeed. Open source is more than a development model. It's a software licensing model. As a result it's also a software as service model. The main difference between commercial and open source is the openness of the code and tendency to the service side rather than shrinkwrapped.
If you see spelling or grammatical errors don't blame me. I tried to preview but IE here at work borked the CSS
That's because language and therefore definitions reflect usage. Dictionaries are hardly "irrelevant" just because they contain common definitions you have some anal disagreement with society over.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Sure, I love bsd as much as the next guy, but seriously - the bsds have more rigid professionalism? more emphasis on correctness over features? Given the amount of improvement in the linux kernel over the past 10 years, compared to that of the bsds, that seems a curious statement.
I guess by improvement in the Linux kernel, you mean broken 2.6 development or bleeding edge hacks that break things. Yes, the BSDs have a much more professional approach. They actually try to retain stability instead of hacking in the latest gee-whiz device driver or VM scheme that breaks things.
"Sufferin' succotash."
It has nothing to do with the GPL. While a few developers (like Alan) are going to refuse to work on non-GPL code, there are an equal number (like Theo) who won't. The details of the licensing is irrelevant to the system's popularity.
There are a couple of things that makes Linux more popular. One is timing, as Linux arrived at a crucial moment (the advent of the cheap 32bit CPU) while BSD was stuck in court with a monopolist. More importantly, Linux is just a piece of the whole. Hackers love to put stuff together, and so the DIY nature of Linux was far more appealing to them than something that was already fully integrated and stable. Finally, Linus had a relatively low threshold for accepting code. If you managed to get his attention, and the code didn't have an obvious stench, you had a pretty good chance of getting it included. Other projects (including GNU, btw) had a much higher threshold for code acceptance.
In short, Linux become more popular because it showed up a the right time and had more of a community atomosphere. If it were all about the GPL, then why doesn't Hurd have even more developers working on it than Linux?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
...are examples of "mob rule". The only variances are which mob is doing what ruling. Even single named individual autocratic leadership organizations, from a nation to a ..kernel,say, are still examples of "mob rule" as ultimate dictates still need to be carried out by a *willing* mob. So called "democratic" organizations-mob rule. A private corporation? Mob rule. Representative republic? Mob rule.
About the only thing that isn't, is a project that is totally conceived, implemented and deployed by a single human. Everything else is an example of a mob, although no one wants to admit they are in a mob, it has a negative connotation and only ever applies to "the other guys" and their "mob".
Not a big point, but helpful in cutting through propoganda and media spin and manipulation.
That hive mind is called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink Groupthink .On slashdot its not that noticeable because of it expansion and varied views people have(a million at least read this forum daily).Groclaw is smaller and the groupthink is more pervasive.What we have on slashdot is
a few "groupthinks" linked into one.
I noticed the longer i stay in a forum,the less i object to its "normality and crowd opinion".
Strong groupthink is what is dangerous,not a shared attitude or ideology strain that got popular.
A monolithic subculture ("Hive mind" you comment about)following some memeplex
is nothing human.Perhaps Borg?
Don't you get urges to "follow the customs of the crowd"?
ex: reposting some Slashdot meme in a thread that is ripe to such witty remarks,bringing satisfaction to the memebot and reinforcing the groupthink in that thread.
Look at the GNU toolchain, then try the UNIX originals. The UNIX originals, frankly, suck in comparison. Were the UNIX folks more creative? Well they needed something, nothing existed, so they made something, there was no-one to copy. The gnu folks copied it because that way everone (aka the users) would know what it was. But they made it far better over time. Was anybody creative in the process? Sure. There was lots of creativity, but it was in dribs and drabs, in details, over a long period of time. What made the GNU stuff great was that it could capture all the improvements over time, because it was free software, where proprietary stuff would have severe NIH because of their licensing model (do not want to share revenues with every bozo that has an idea.)
The activity in the private sector that goes into creative innovation is miniscule compared to the amount that is either just plain obvious to someone in the domain, a minor improvement on something existing, or just outright copying/competing with somebody else. 99+% of creativity is obvious. Look at Apple, the ipod was not creative in a technical sense. What distinguished it was the design and execution. How well it was done in comparison to other mp3 players and integration with itunes.