The Open Source Business?

Ted wonders: "Being an advocate of the open source software movement for some time, I'm wondering how and if the principles of open source software could be applied to a new type of open source business. In a world where people slave away for the sole profit of a board of directors and merciless shareholders, is there room for a new type of organization that throws away the archaic and monolithic organizational structure of today and from there form a company that has its direction dictated by all of the members that run it. An organization where everyone has an equal say in what goes on. There isn't any limit on how many people can be involved (the more the better, in fact) as long as they can be useful. Could this be the way of the future?"

Comments

Re:Who's neck?

[thethibs]

We don't need to knock communism—it does a great job of knocking itself.

I know they don't teach history in CS streams, but look it up. Communism has failed everywhere it has been tried, in spite of using force to keep everybody inside. You don't see a whole lot of American refugees lining up to become Cuban citizens. Ask your parents about the Aquarian 60's and the thousands of communes that formed in the US and Canada and lasted about two weeks before the cooperative spirit waned.

Business organizations where everyone is a stakeholder are called co-ops. They've been around for a long time and every capitalist society has a small number of them. They work especially well when the only reason for belonging is to save money. The successful ones have a permanent management team that really makes all the decisions while everyone else just harvests the benefits and goes to the occasional meeting to vote unanimously in favor of management proposals.

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What America needs is a president who can save the world while humping chubby jewish girls in the oval office.

Re:Good luck with that

[Jedi Alec]

Very few other industries work that way (power generation and distribution are one).

is that why the the amount i pay to have a kWh delivered to my house is almost as much as the amount i pay for the actual power? those 150 kV poles didn't grow by themselves you know :)

Not entirely a new idea

[Captain Lobotomy]

Read "Ecotopia" by Ernest Callenbach. Carefully. Ignore the insipid embedded love story and concentrate on the socio-political ideas presented in the book. When you're done with it, go back and read it again. Then think of a world where all businesses are employee-owned.

Consulting Firms

[Anonymous Coward]

Professional consulting firms -- such as accountants, lawyers, and engineers -- are frequently run as partnerships. The professionals who bring in work and bill for it decide on corporate direction and management policies; there are no outside shareholders. Furthermore, there's a lot of freedom and responsibility for individual professionals; they're expected to find and manage their own work, rather than operate under close management supervision. But if you don't bill enough work, the other professionals have little interest in keeping you as a partner.

Accounting, janitorial, and secretarial staff, while necessary to the operation of the firm, are generally treated as an overhead expense, and their hours are not billed out. Thus they are not given votes in the direction of the firm.

Re:Leadership by committee? Doubtful.

[radtea]

Look at all of the companies where the workers voted themselves higher and higher wages and more benefits... and then went bankrupt or out of business because they were no longer competitive.

I sure do--that would be guys like these, right?

Offhand, though, I can't think of a single case where a worker-run company has suffered anything comparable. Certainly not in the last few decades.

Corporate governance is about monkey psychology, which in practical terms means the tendency for arrogant idiots to rise to the top of human social hierarchies. Smart people realize their own limitations, and don't have deep-seated adequacy issues, and so tend to stay out of the climb to the "top", leaving a clear field for the kind of losers we get there. Most of whom, I agree, aren't competent to run a lemonade stand.