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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.
PJ over at Groklaw http://www.groklaw.net/ has this story.
The reporter interviewed her. She has his questions and her answers. He obviouly ignored what she told him and printed a story full of factual innacuracies.
This is bad, bad reporting. Do I still trust the Economist? Not much.
"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)
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.
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.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
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
Deleted
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
If the guy was so offended, why didn't he just edit the Wikipedia entry to fix the mistakes?
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
Wikipedia is not, in the traditional style, open source. With open source projects, there is still a central leader or small team of developers vetting contributions. With Wikipedia there are no such checks, with content being controlled by those who edit and revert fastest and those who can sneak malicious contributions into obscure places. There is also no-one handling the overall quality of any individual entry, thus the horrible prevalent writing style.
Liking Wikipedia to Linux is a huge error. The quality issue is extremely relevant.
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
"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
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?
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.
Mob rule has it's problems, but I'll take it over plutocratic aristocracy any day of the week.
Yes, well said. However, it's worth pointing out that lots of free software is developed with good practices. Probably more free software developers use version control systems and bug ticketing than proprietary development processes. It's well established I think, that Free Software code is more conscientiously checked and validated before being submitted and committed to the mainline code base. Moreover, we have free tools available for all sorts of things, like code testing, vulnerability discovery, etc., along with lots of documentation and discussion about how that is useful, and how to actually use it.
PJ and her followers do not take even mild criticism of open source well at all.
This is giving way too much credit to SCO's claims. I don't think it was ever proved that a single line owned by SCO was found in Linux. As I recall they were basing their claims on free lines of BSD which were added to both SCO and Linux.
And after the furore over the biographical entry last year, Wikipedia changed its rules so that only registered users can edit existing entries
This is simply wrong. Anonymous users can and always have been able to edit existing articles.
Well, this article is still pretty decent but I expect better from The Economist.
...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.
How do we know it can only be explained in terms of human experience? Please state some facts to back up your assumption.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
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: 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.)
Once again we have a group of people amazed by the concept of giving away knowlege for nothing without noticing that we got to where we are today by exactly that process. We need better science education in our schools and universities - if only to stop some bottom rung business graduate who has achieved his position via connected relatives from calling us commies for using firefox.
Edison for many good reasons is held up as the great example of technological capitalism, and the light bulb as his greatest acheivement. Consider that many of his contemporaries even in remote parts of the world also produced working light bulbs within weeks of the time and totally independant of his efforts - he built his great acheivement on the shared knowlege produced by others and circulated worldwide.
To sum up, open source is an old idea and Bill's idea of charging money for hobby software is a new one.
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.