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

Re:Check out Groklaw

[sgtrock]

I don't understand Groklaw's beef.

OK. Hopefully I can help fill in the blanks. :)

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.

The tone of the Economist's article was that this meant that OSS had failed somehow because they had to be organized the same way that businesses are organized:

However, it is unclear how innovative and sustainable open source can ultimately be. The open-source method has vulnerabilities that must be overcome if it is to live up to its promise. For example, it lacks ways of ensuring quality and it is still working out better ways to handle intellectual property.

But the biggest worry is that the great benefit of the open-source approach is also its great undoing. Its advantage is that anyone can contribute; the drawback is that sometimes just about anyone does. This leaves projects open to abuse, either by well-meaning dilettantes or intentional disrupters. Constant self-policing is required to ensure its quality.

Clearly, the writer had never read Producing Open Source Software:How to Run a Sucessful Free Software Project. The book does a fine job of explaining that yes, some projects do attempt to run as some sort of anarchistic society. Most if not all of those projects fail. People are still people, after all. They still need a community with a strong leadership in order to succeed at any long term project. Why did the writer not know this? Why the assumption that this meant OSS had failed?

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?

Oh, come on! You're kidding, right? Here's what the Economist article said:

But more troubling is copyright: if the code comes from many authors, who really owns it? This issue took centre stage in 2003, when a company called SCO sued users of Linux, including IBM and DaimlerChrysler, saying that portions of the code infringed its copyrights. The lines of programming code upon which SCO based its claims had changed owners through acquisitions over time; at some point they were added into Linux.

To sceptics, the suit seems designed to thwart the growth of Linux by spreading unease over open source in corporate boardrooms--a perception fuelled by Microsoft's involvement with SCO. The software giant went out of its way to connect SCO with a private-equity fund that helped finance the lawsuits, and it paid the firm many millions to license the code. Fittingly, Microsoft indemnifies its customers against just this sort of intellectual-property suit--something that open-source products are only starting to do.

For the moment, users of Linux say that SCO-like worries have not affected their adoption of open-source software. But they probably would be leery if, over time, the code could not be vouched for. In response, big open-source projects such as Linux, Apache and Mozilla have implemented rigid procedures so that they can attest to the origins of the code. In other words, the openness of open source does not necessarily mean it is anonymous. Strikingly, even more monitoring of operations is required in open source than in other sorts of businesses.

Here's what PJ said in response:

Heh heh. Not exactly. IBM wasn't sued for using Linux. It was sued for contributing code to Linux. SCO mainly is suing IBM by means of a theory of contract, as best as anyone can make out, a ladder theory by which somehow the contract can be interpreted in a novel way so that any code IBM writes, if it ever touches UNIX SystemV, or