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

I doubt it

[dazilla]

Strangely enough, we tried this type of concept in running our WoW guild. It was nice at first, but as we increased in visibility, we needed people to take on specific roles, and be able to make snap decisions without consulting others. A hierarchical power structure ended up materializing despite our best efforts to keep it decentralized. Also, when we tried decision-making by polling everyone on every single issue, the decisions would take insanely long to determine. In the end, while in a perfect world an "Open-Source Business" should be implementable, I would need major convincing to believe that it could be done and maintained in our world.

Yes, but you have to RTFM

[delirium of disorder]

As other posters have mentioned, cooperatives and collectives are one option for a more free business model; there are many others. You may be interested in Anarcho-Syndicalism. Syndicalists see labor unions as a force for revolutionary social change, replacing capitalism and the State with a new society democratically self-managed by workers. Millions of human hours have been spent thinking about and articulating radically free economic paradigms. Your idea for an open source business is interesting, but doesn't go into much detail. You just say that it would be web based, have startup costs, and will go in whatever direction the workers want. It's not a bad idea, but if you and anyone who reads your "plan" are serious, then you should look at the history of nonhierarchical organizations and learn from the theories, failures, and successes of the past. After you develop stronger ideas about how to create democracy in the workplace, you should create a more concrete plan.

Name an open source project run this way

[clymere]

It says something that the most succesful open source projects tend to be run on a model almost identical to a typical corporation. I believe Linus refers to it as the "benevolent dictator" model.

What the poster is describing is nothing less than mob rule. Theres a certain amount of this to all open source projects, but you'll find almost all have a small group of people ultimately making the decision about what direction to take. And of course if they make enough bad decisions, a portion of their developers can always create a fork

If anything, its the pirate form of democracy. Everyone gets their say, the captain makes the final decision, and if makes enough bad ones, they vote in a new captain.