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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
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
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
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.
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.
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.)