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."

Comments

Summary gets anarchism wrong

[HooliganIntellectual]

"It cites Firefox, MySQL and (more recently) Wikipedia as examples of projects that do not simply allow anarchy to rein in..."

As an anarchist geek, let me point out that this is a wrong use of the word "anarchy." Anarchism is a political philosophy that is FOR organization. Many people have described Wikipedia as an example of "anarchism in action" and they aren't misusing the word instead of using "chaos." The free software/open source (FOSS) movement is another example of anarchism in action and includes many actual anarchists working on various projects.

Find out more about anarchism at http://www.infoshop.org/ (where half of the visitors are using Firefox and other open source browsers)

Re:Summary gets anarchism wrong

[tobiasly]

Someone seriously needs to fix that site's FAQ. I honestly tried to figure out what "anarchism" means but instead left with a splitting headache.

If I were trying to make a FAQ as unreadable as possible, here are some techniques I would use:

• Make the text as tiny as possible.
• Make the onhover event for each paragraph set its text to be bold and bright blue. This has the added bonus of making all other text on the page jump around constantly.
• Make each FAQ entry about a dozen paragraphs long, and filled with alternating italic and bold text and plenty of cross-references thrown in for good measure.

Seriously, the entire page screams "go away". Was this website developed via anarchy?

Re:Summary gets anarchism wrong

[Haeleth]

The trouble with dictionaries these days is they've completely abdicated their responsibility and gone to a role of simply reflecting usage. So when a word is often misused, the misuse winds up being legitimised by the dictionary entries.

What "responsibility"? What "misuse"? A word cannot be "often misused" - if it's often used a certain way, then that is how it is used, and it is the fact of the usage that legitimises its inclusion in dictionaries, not the other way round!

As the poet wrote:

licuit semperque licebit
signatum praesente nota producere nomen
. . .
multa renascentur quae iam cecidere cadentque
quae nunc sunt in honore vocabula si volet usus
quem penes arbitrium est et ius et norma loquendi

...in other words, language changes, language is supposed to change, and the only "authority" that controls it and determines what is right and what is wrong is popular usage.

I can't believe that people today, in this age of progress and enlightenment, more than two thousand years after Horace wrote the words above (and he certainly wasn't the first person to make this observation), are still trying to pretend that there is some kind of objective right or wrong to language that can be fixed in stone and preserved for ever.

Yet Again, the BSDs get Snubbed

[putko]

The BSDs have more rigid professionalism than the typical Linux project. I don't know why this is, but there is a focus on correctness over features.

Yet again, the PR-excellence of the Linux crowd wins. Even though, for instance, Yahoo!, a company that hosts a huge number of sites (and stores), uses FreeBSD.

That's OK with me -- it is a secret weapon.

Re:Yet Again, the BSDs get Snubbed

[marcosdumay]

GPL wins. A professor may not bother that people close his code, but companies do, so lots of developers never see the BSD kernels, nor work with it. And the word doesn't spread, so people don't consider it.

Re:Sounds like...

[Dr. Evil]

It actually makes no sense given that there's no single entity responding to the mob. They act as individuals on individual pages.

Mob rule might be the case if they're deciding on a single issue. But if you can't get a mob to even decide what issue they're deciding upon, then it's just a whole lot of people doing things.

What never made sense to me

[K-Man]

If the guy was so offended, why didn't he just edit the Wikipedia entry to fix the mistakes?

Re:Sounds like...

[fm6]

Ever read about the writing of the U.S. Constitution? Those guys argued and agonized about how they were going to set up a true democracy that wasn't just mob rule. The didn't exactly do a perfect job, but they did suprisingly well.

My big gripe with Wikipedia is that it just takes it for granted that everybody wants to work together to create an optimal result. I'm not just talking about pranksters and vandals. I'm talking about people who aren't really interested in collaboration — they have a certain notion of what Wikipedia should be, and they're not interested in anything that contradicts that.

In any social system, somebody has to have the last word. In a hierachy, it's the folks on top. In a true democracy, it's something resembling a consensus. In mob rule, it's whoever's the biggest bully. Wikipedia seems to combine the worst aspects of all three!

Ask Slashdot:

[Errandboy of Doom]

Are there good open source projects that buck this trend, that disprove the thesis of this article?

This is the crowd that would know.

Or in the alternative, is "strong central leadership" so inherent to all human endeavors that the thesis is a meaningless tautology?

Anarchy

[LeapingQuince]

It is unfortunate that the term anarchy has a dual meaning - the most common being "disorder". A more historical meaning is that of "without authority", which seems to be what open source is all about - nobody telling anybody else what to do.

Open source projects are the model of anarchist principles - people getting together, contributing when they want to, and promoting the common good. Even Wikipedia knows that.

Re:Leadership

[Tony Hoyle]

Define vandalism.

In Wikipedia the most active editor wins. Whether they're right or wrong.

I've heard a couple of horror stories of the admins at wikipedia forcing agendas too (things like refusing very minor edits because they mention things they disagree with, and even blocking page names for things that they disagree with)*

It's an interesting variation on the blog, but I wouldn't call it 'successful' in any way. Slashdot fanboys like it, that's all.

* And the person who told me this is trustworthy, and definately an expert in their field having 20+ years experience. The eventually managed to get some edits in but only after appealing to other admins who removed the page blocks - 6 months later.

Re:Check out Groklaw

[tabdelgawad]

I don't understand Groklaw's beef. She (PJ) was asked two questions. Her first answer was one of the main points of the article: hierarchy is an integral part of successful open source development. Her second answer was a dodge: "You think Wikipedia is bad? The MSM is worse!". As for the factual inaccuracies, what exactly were they? The fact that the author didn't get the "groklaw-approved" exact wording right for telling us SCO is suing IBM, DaimlerChrysler and Autozone? Give me a break.

Perhaps I'm biased against Groklaw. Sometimes I can't take the world-weary, sighing, 'know all the answers', 'the rest of the world is idiotic' tone of the postings there. I'm sure I'll be punished accordingly by groklaw fans with mod points, but what use is good Karma if you can't cash it in once in a while? :)

PJ overreacts - again

[rumblin'rabbit]

I read the article. It isn't near as bad as the denizens of Groklaw make it out to be. It isn't an "attack on open source" as some there claimed - more of an analysis. Jeez, The Economist even makes the point that some companies are are copying the methods of the open source community.

PJ and her followers do not take even mild criticism of open source well at all.

Re:Leadership

[Frozen Void]

I see..have you considered that wikipedia software may be improved?
Add moderation(users vote on article -1 flamebait),article voting(for best version),click stats(view per day,week,month,country,etc).
Soem other wikis will have these features and rule the wikisphere.
Wikipedia is in current form is flawed and the policies aren't attractive in any sense.
I stopped posting after they required registration for new articles,
deleted what i wrote in other articles(with a snobby excuse).
I improve wiki pages ocassionaly but i won't dedicate a spare minute for it.
The project going wrong way.

Re:Sounds like...

[Ragica]

Couple of potential problems with this point of view.

• Charismatic manipulators (of marginal intelligence can sometimes use various means of manipulating large numbers of morons in ways that most more thoughtful persons would not stoop to. (This is leaving even more complex issues of proportional representation, and other weirdness elements of elections aside.)
• "using the history page" requires the target being defamed to know that they have a wikipedia entry. Anyone can go and add an entry about you and you may not know for some time. Someone may cunningly edit your entry, and you may not know for some time.
• most viewers won't use the history page, even if they did realise its purpose, because it's an extra click. Kind of like microsoft knowing almost everyone is going to use IE even though it sucks ass, just because it's what's in front of them.

This being said, I love Wikipedia, and use it several times a week. It's a great resource. But it does have some pretty big inherent problems due to its nature. No use in glossing over that fact.

Challenging the Managerialist View

[McLuhanesque]

As a PhD researcher into the evolution of organizational forms, I find the facile application of open source principles rather distressing - especially when they're used either to reinforce the notion that hierarchies (read: control and power) really are important, or to promote that people should work for free and donate their efforts to the "greater good" (read: more profits for the shareholders and more shite for the workers).

I have a paper that challenges these notions being published in the upcoming (Summer 2006) edition of Organization Development Journal called, "THE PENGUINIST DISCOURSE: A critical application of open source software project management
to organization development"

While I can't make the paper available online just yet, the abstract reads as follows:

The apparent altruism observed among contributors to Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) initiatives is often envied by managers seeking to inspire and motivate employees. While conventional managerialist authors often encourage the emulation of FLOSS management style, this paper seeks a social-psychological understanding of FLOSS contributors' motivation, and the control dynamics of the projects' organization. Radical changes to the some of the basic assumptions of conventional practices may be required to translate FLOSS approaches to corporate management.

For those with in-house OD folks, you may want to alert them to the next edition of the journal. (I also do strategy and OD facilitation and interventions on a contract basis; you can track me down via my profile.)