Slashdot Mirror
Toward the Open Company
Arto Stimms writes "The author of the e text editor is using the principles of open source to transform his company into an Open Company. Not only is he releasing the source, the company itself becomes totally open: no concept of bosses or employees. Anyone can join in at any time, doing whatever task they find interesting, for whatever time they find appropriate. This is in service of the idea of 'the real freedom zero': the freedom to decide for yourself what you want to work on."
...but without the paycheck.
You think your unorthodox HR practices will protect you from labor laws and unions? LOL!
THL phish sticks
This is the kind of thinking that made the hippie commune into the corporate juggernaut it is today. By "corporate juggernaut" I mean, virtually extinct.
The best "Open" corporate structure I've ever head of was a company that had a policy where no person could make more than seven times as much money as any other person in the company.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
-1 flamebait.
But seriously. how do you expect to make a profit? Why form a company?
nothing to see here, move along.
Sent from your iPad.
This looks as promising as the dirty hippy factory I built last year. Buy one dirty hippy get one free, for a limited time at DirtyHippyFactory.com. Offer void in Ohio and where prohibited by law. Limit 2 dirty hippies per household.
so i can sit on my ass reading slashdot all day and say that i am contributing to research and development.
It's just like staying in the comfort of your own home, indulging in your hobby of programming, only you're somewhere else!
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
It seems that running a successful business or venture, profit or not is more complex task than writing software.
It is simple to see on the example of open software open company.
Open software company: open code + choice company organization of sails, marketing and distribution (that can include "open company" if it is profitable)
Open software open company: open code + one particular type of company organization (no boss).
First method has more variability than the second and have more chances to survive.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I think the new buzzword for this is "crowdsourcing".
They can invent "Open Bankruptcy" next. Call me when they reach "Open Assets Selloff" by the creditors.
What? Too cynical? Is that even possible anymore?
Oh, you mean this company is not going to pay me and I should work for free?
Read. The. Fucking. Article.
No, really.
Or cloudsourcing. No. Crowdcomputing? Wait... Clouds of crowds sourcing computers?
All income in the company (minus operating expenses), will be passed through the trust metric and distributed to participants -- emphasis mine. Who's determining his own salary?
Want a glimpse of how this works out? Think about Karma on slashdot or karma on reddit. If you've participated attentively in either of those systems you already know how problematic this will be.
First time I read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, I thought the idea of huffy was pretty cool. Since then, seeing how such popularity systems work on the web has made me realize it may not be that great a system.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Atlas Shrugged is not actually a history book. It's not even a good piece of fiction, and the economics and politics therein are laughable.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
Go Galt already, asshole. I'm tired of your incessant whining.
-
If it's all about open source and free software - why is there a "trial version" and licence fee for the software?
"Atlas Shrugged" is a *history* book? Perhaps you should read it again, this time more carefully.
The best 'Open' corporate structure I've heard of is the John Lewis Partnership in the UK.
ALL employees are 'partners', from the shelf stackers in Waitrose to the head honcho of the group. Yes the pay varies, but they all get the same bonus as a percentage of their salary.
The percentage is announced at the same time across all stores. By all accounts it's a very good place to work.
-Ben
This sounds a lot like the idea I had 1 year ago , but never had time to put in practice. [I'm still slaving for a "corporate juggernaut"]
I was planning to call it the Virtual Company - a completely flat structure where teams and individuals work on commercial / open projects of choice. [By the way I know some great sales guys with telecom contacts which can pull in contracts worth several million / year ].
Now I see the same idea on slashdot. The time has come for revolution ;-) Going to RTA as soon as I finish the Customer Solution Description I'm working on (probably around 3 AM local time).
Great idea! Why don't you all come and work for my company for free!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
There is a trustrank plan for assigning compensation, which is a little farfetched, IMO. FTA:
The problem is that any kind of trustrank system can be gamed. This would likely degenerate into a core clique that games the system to reward themselves disproportionately -- even if the concept ever got off the ground.
Never mind the people who make valuable contributions that are unpopular among code contributors (such as marketing, sales, accounting, etc).
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Oh, you mean this company is not going to pay me and I should work for free?
Read. The. Fucking. Article.
No, really.
Lower UIDs concur.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
I bet the have no janitor...
Kind of like the Prisoner's Dilemma. Now we'll have everyone giving each other high marks so everyone will get high pay.
What happens when nobody wants to do the unglamorous, low paying work?
This is reminiscent of open source governance. However the concept is a little more sensible in the realm of governance, where people are (allegedly) not actively trying to make money.
Earlier in the post it says "The central dilemma of Open Source is, and has always been, how to make a living doing it" -- but then it turns out that the actual plan is a non sequitur.
Never mind the people who make valuable contributions that are unpopular among code contributors (such as marketing, sales, accounting, etc).
That's a valid point. I suspect necessary services such as accounting are an outsourced cost, not part of the internal system, although I confess I haven't dug that deep.
Technical writers, sales, and such may get the shaft, if programmers turn out to (a) be overwhelming in numbers relative to other folks, and (b) be short-sighted enough to rank down non-programmers in the trust system regardless of work quality. It'll be interesting t'see how it plays out.
Can I work from home??
Slashdot introduced its notion of karma, earned for activities perceived to promote group effectiveness, an approach that has been very influential in later virtual communities.
So, to get paid more, you just say that Apple did it better and the Microsoft's version sucks and the best implementation is in Linux?
And to get vacation do you post stuff to get "Funny" ratings like; "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of e-editors" or "In Soviet Russia the e-Editor you!" and then there's the "All your e-Editors are belong to us!"
Yep, the Open Business, sounds like a great way for the Karma whore to make a living!
I just wrote a business plan for a business that creates and manages open source Joomla websites. One of my goals is to create environments where everyone can cluster their thoughts. the business plan is on my website vertualize.com I just turned in the business plan yesterday for a competition in Northern California.
Getting really offtopic, but I thought I'd share this interesting Economist article regarding Atlas Shrugged.
Atlas felt a sense of deja vu
Feb 26th 2009
The economic bust has caused a boom for at least one author
BOOKS do not sell themselves: that is what films are for. "The Reader", the book that inspired the Oscar-winning film, has shot up the bestseller lists. Another recent publishing success, however, has had more help from Washington, DC, than Hollywood. That book is Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged".
http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13185404
The guy doing this determines the operating expenses, including (I'd assume) their own salary. If it's really as open as they claim, all the accounting will be public, too. So anyone who wants to do some work can see how much the company is spending on those operating expenses, and the (ongoing) income statements. If they accept it as reasonable, they can do the work, or they can just not do the work.
This principle could work. It's like a cooperative company, "employee owned", but without employees owning shares in the corporation getting dividends of the profits (income - expenses), just a direct share. Eliminating the shareholding eliminates control, but it also makes coming and going as a "profitholder" much easier.
Of course the real problem is the "trust metric". It's a popularity rating, set by members of the group on anyone else who joins the group. Joining requires only contributing code. There's going to be a fair amount of (paid) work by group members reviewing the code to decide trust, but that's a necessary part of software quality anyway.
The real problem is for people who contribute code (or review, or other work) who aren't rewarded with trust metrics by others in the group, perhaps because of a bias by some against others because of the type of work. If some people contribute only code, and others contribute only review, that might lead to a "class war" where one group discounts the value of the other, regardless of the (only guessable) "real" value of each kind of work to the profits being divided up. If more people review than code, even if that's not necessary, and the reviwers all have a bias in rewarding each other's work more than they reward coders, an coders don't have a bigger bias against reviewers to compensate for their smaller numbers, then reviewers will get a higher rate of reward than coders. Which could prevent any coders from contributing. Or the sizes/biases could be reversed, and reviewers could get shorted enough that no one reviews.
I think this project goes too far all at once. If this system were familiar across our large Internet development population through its exercise within closed groups, with more permanent membership, perhaps assigned traditionally by a boss who hires, it's less likely to be torn apart by people who don't understand they're working against their own best interests. Then, once it's understood to be workable by people who understand their best interests, and not just an easy target for losers looking to game a system they merely clumsily destroy, maybe the transition from co-op to open co-op would work.
Does anyone know of any successful closed co-ops running like this one, but centrally hired, fired and assigned shares of the profits?
--
make install -not war
Hey dude, there's no bosses around here. Giving orders is like uncool, man.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
On reading this, was looking forward to snagging a copy if it is open source, as the current Windows open source text editor I use is not entirely to my liking.
No dice. This company has an interesting variation on open source:
"... To discourage piracy, a tiny but essential core (also containing the licensing code), will be kept private (at least until users reach a certain rating)."
Well, they got some free publicity on Slashdot at any rate.
Anyone recommend a good Windows editor? Not into vi/emacs style editors. Wordpad/Notepad do as a last resort, but are not designed for technical uses.
I use an IDE for code, but frequently need a programmers editor for data files or when using PCs other than my development box.
Textpad is shareware and may not have been bought at some companies. I found its Unicode support problematic in the past. Handles massive data files well though.
Notepad++ is free &open source, but a little rough around the edges in usability. Like many IDEs, it adds code folding to XML documents. When XML files are very large this is a problem due to the number of widgets that get created to support minimizing and maximizing each parent node. Notepad++ managed to crash the video drivers on one PC here, which is almost perversely impressive.
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
I'll read your "history book" when you watch my "documentary."
rule of thumb: if your plans for a group/ community/ company/ society relies upon people acting dependably in ways no group of humans have ever acted, in any society, in the history of the world, its gonna fail
human nature is what it is. learn its good parts, learn its ugly parts, and don't imagine you are ever going to change them
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
She was a screen writer, after all. The novels were side projects of hers.
Yes, we do.
Then again, this is slashdot. Since when have most commenters *ever* RTFA?
The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
Maybe, but it makes some good points with them. They extreme beyond reality to show those points clearly, instead of being muddied with grey areas.
It's supposed to highlight a problem and describe a philosophy, and it does it very, very well.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Companies would like to produce goods/services without having to pay employees and employees would like to be paid without having to work.
Companies value value. Open source projects value valuelessness (if that is a word). You give your time for free for the greater good of the open source project, not to increase the value of the project for it's owners.
2 very ideologically/psychologically opposed concepts.
I don't see how this can work out in the long run.. (despite the legal ramifications in regards to company ownership and other issues.. insurance etc.. who is liable if your company gets sued etc.. )
if i code something that generates a continuous cash flow.. how does that value get divided..
the open (source?) contractors? will not be owners of the company unless the company offers shares..
work is value is money, I dont have any skills, can i buy into your open source company? can I buy your open source company outright? I have worked, can I exchange my shares into hard cash.. who signs the cheque?
it sounds a little half baked imho. _w_
1. Assign thyself the task of "bookkeeping"
2. Tunnel the monies to a swiss bank account
3. ???
4. Profit!
If you look to anthropology you will see that we spend the overwhelming part of our history as tribal bands of hunter-gatherers, where nobody really had the means to force others work for them.
If you look back in history you will see (as far back as you can look) huge civilizations that, even though they might have each been organized differently, still had kings and other leaders who could tell others what to do. There were slaves and others who worked while some supervised and benefited from their labour.
Hunter-gatherers, my foot.
So... working (or rather... participating in, since you get *paid* for work) there, I hope that one of the major projects they're working on is how to prepare dirt and sand into edible food and wearable clothes. For free. Because the grocery store or my landlord certainly aren't going to be on-board for this free living.
Or if it's meant that we just volunteer there when we're not at our REGULAR job, then it'd better be open 24/7, since generally people are at *work* during the day.
You'd have to have people really into working there too, since of course they'll be paying for the commute to and from there. Also with a physical office, you can absolutely guarantee that anything of even remote value will be stolen.
And this is why open source anything so far is online and non-physical. Society as a whole is a crime-hole, and I pity those pretending it's not. They'll learn soon enough.
The system is supposed to ensure fairness by having employees rate each other, but I know how this goes simply by watching people around me, in person and in real life.
Every 'contest' I've ever seen has been about popularity, not efficiency. They guy who sucks up to everyone and buys them beers after work will have the highest pay, while the guy who does his shitty job in silent magnificence will have one of the lowest pays. In addition, everyone in a group will rate their own group members higher than they rate other group's members. This means the biggest group will have the highest average pay as well.
Absolutely none of it will be based on efficiency or profitability.
That is, assuming it's truly 'open' and not just claiming it and then having the owner overrule everything anyhow.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Lowerer UIDs concurer ... oh, wait..
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Except it's not the prisoner's dilemma (as classically stated), because cooperation will always return less than cheating, and double-betrayal returns equal to cooperation. Eg. I assign you 1/100th share and you assign me 1/100th share - equal shares, we both split the proceeds equally. If I assign you 1/2 share, and you assign me 1/2 share, we both split the proceeds equally. If I assign you 1/100th share and you assign me 1/2 share, I walk away with almost everything. I've not RTFA, so I'm not sure if that's what they are doing exactly, but if so there is no incentive to cooperate under that schema.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
This sounds great!! ...so how bad are the bathrooms in a company like this? I'm pretty sure cleaning up other people's uh...messes...isn't a "task they find interesting" and if it is, I'm sure the "time they find appropriate" would be pretty close to zero.
This would likely degenerate into a core clique that games the system to reward themselves disproportionately -- even if the concept ever got off the ground.
So basically, executives?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
i am not foolish enough that i think i can convert a True Believer in a forum thread
the only thing that will teach you is to try and fail on your own terms. there are many suboptimal business structures out there. you can limp along in mediocrity for decades. but you won't achieve true business success, at least i don't think. hell, prove me wrong, go for it, i don't know everything. but i'm completely unimpressed. all you have here is a formula for mediocre marginalia in my mind
ideas on organization are always in competition. what is the yardstick we use to measure them? simple monetary success or monetary failure. if this structure you champion is based on nothing more than a desire to compete and win in a pure business environment, then it is sound, and will succeed, and beat out other organizational structures
or it won't
welcome the jubngle of ideas, competing in darwinian struggle. you're going to need more than optimistic idealism to survive out there. good luck, little pioneer
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Seriously, managing bits? That's your "business"? Nothing real gets created. We need real tangible products, or service to real tangible products. Not imaginary items. This is why the USA fell behind, we're obsessed with the abstract, and not with the real.
Wake up America, seriously. You're living in a virtual dreamworld. The Matrix is the next stop for you.
Oh boy, a text editor with all the quality and accuracy of a Wikipedia article. I can't wait for the first edit war between two high-ranking programmers.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Atlas Shrugged has its place among the numerous other philosophical works presenting wild economic ideas, including works by Locke, Mill, Marx, Pound, and Skinner (to name only a few). Skinner is especially apt to mention, as he describes in fiction an idealized commune much in the same way Rand describes an idealized market. Neither one properly treats the full complexity of the issue.
The Huffington Post correspondent's chair is right behind me
If this statement were true, wouldn't it sort of defeat the purpose of posting anonymously?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
What happens when nobody wants to do the unglamorous, low paying work?
Exactly. There are some parts of the code which are downright ugly, hard to write/fix, unpopular to even discuss, and when implemented will only be seen by a tiny percentage of users - but without which (esp. when accumulated with other unpopular stuff) the software will only compete as an also-ran.
This is the problem with Linux and other OSS projects: in a complex system, every user will run across something which is in this "unpopular" category. Sure the user is allegedly welcome to contribute a fix, but frankly the reason s/he has your software is to USE it, not to FIX it. Personally, I find the installers unbearable: yeah they work fine for popular software, but all to many packages don't install in a usable manner, and I have other things to do than fix someone else's project (pardon my alleged hubris, but my time is worth more than that).
Apple (and most other companies) succeeds because someone, paid for their responsibility, identifies that some unpopular and unrecognized tasks must be done. They make sure that the whole project is completed and up to par, even when most other participants don't know some obscure part exists and took great effort to make work.
How are co-workers supposed to vote "yeah, he did a good job" when practically nobody is aware of what he did? especially when it's some complex obscurity that would ultimately make-or-break the project? Who's going to do something unglamorous, knowing they won't get paid even a fair low fee? Fairly compensating talent is not a popularity contest; knowing the value of work done is.
If not for minimum wage, how much would YOU pay your janitor?
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
in a consumer driven market, the entrepeneur uses market prices to make economic calculations and tries to make profits by satisfying consumer demand. the more profitable entrepeneur satisfies the consumer the most. the extent to which the consumer is satisfied is measured by the entrepeneur's profits/losses. the entrepeneur hires employees based on their marginal productivity. they would be paid just abit more than the price they save the entrepeneur through their productivity. the more productive the employee, the higher the wage. wages come about through the laws of supply and demand, just like any other market price. the lack of any pricing system (wages included) would render any type of economic calculation impossible. it would also make profits/losses extinct, thus making it impossible to measure the extent to which consumers are satisfied. complete economic/social/technological breakdwon would follow. this by the way is the school of thought of austrian, free market economics. ludwig von mises predicted the failure of socialist/communist regime (related to the "open company" ONLY through the lack of pricing prinicple in my analogy) based on this basic theory at the turn of the last century way before it all happened.
I know about this issue of being involved with an intagible world, I have been dealing with issue my whole life. If I am building websites, that is not what people need to survive, these are not vital necessities. But perhaps I can crowdsource anad use FOSS to help deliver the demanded products to the world. The internet is just a tool that we all agree to use universally. If building website doesn't help the world, what can I do with my computer skills to boost the economy?
on the open market, person A makes eight times more money than person B in the same period of time.
Except you don't say how many sales A and B make. If X cost 7 tymes what Y does but they have the same capabilities it's likely more Ys will be sold. I doubt even you will pay 7 tymes what an item cost for the same functionality.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Even assuming that the Trust Metrics work perfectly, you still have another unbalanced problem: limited income / unlimited resources.
One of the advantages of closed companies is they can choose how many people they are going to pay. In this open company example, what are you going to do if 500+ software developers (or others) decided to sign up and the net income for the year is only $50K?
You would not be to support yourself and forced to find additional income.
Read. The. Fucking. Article.
I read it. My main concern is the rating system. Users only have an incentive to vote others down to make themselves seem more competitive. How can you guarantee honest votes?
I predict a voting war where, sooner or later, some one will have to take charge and settle the conflicts.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Social Darwinism is a propaganda tool used by conservatives to maintain the current power structure.
I'm confused... I thought conservatives reject Darwinism in favor of Creationism.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I'd say you didn't read "Altas Shrugged" but you already did say it. In it the subject John Galt travels the world to talk business owners to convince them to abandon their business because of socialist governments nationalizing businesses.
If Ayn Rand was right, engineers would make more money than CEOs.
It's easier if they start their own business and or work for themselves. Even Bill Gates started as a programmer when he started Microsoft. He was the first person to hack a basic interpreter, the Altair BASIC, for a homebrew or microcomputer. He dropped out of college to do so.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The article says "To discourage piracy, a tiny but essential core (also containing the licensing code), will be kept private (at least until users reach a certain rating)." That's most definitely not going to work. Such an open-ended system cannot demand commitments like this without deterring potential participants. Instead it must reflect the way open source software is created.
Atlas Shrugged is not actually a history book.
It definitely feels like current events though.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Actually in Mondragon in the Basque country they have worker-cooperatives working as a corporate structure
I heard about them years ago, I wonder how the worker coops in Euskadi are doing now.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
From the not-going-to-happen department
Berkshire Hathaway is an outlier.
You work whenever you feel like it, and... the company pays you whenever you feel like it!
There's a reason firms are organized the way they are (and why they get all screwed up over a certain size). The yexist because the lower the transaction costs between the individual actors in the firm.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
He is a beurocrat. His purpose for not logging in is: WTF is this "logging in" of which they speak? Have I just been insulted? ;-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
It's possible to do things like marketing and sales well and ethically. If you actually believe in a product and have a genuine interest in helping your customers, so you're basically acting as a liaison between the customer and the company, rather than an employee of the latter.
I think most "open" programmers would respect that sort of marketing. There'd probably even be significant overlap between the two jobs..
Nobody's mentioned the Cluetrain Manifesto yet. Have we got a generation of slashdotters who weren't around at the time who need to be pointed at it?
Unlike on, say, wikipedia, the entry requirements (in terms of the ability to code in such a way its useful to a big project) are high enough to automatically exclude a lot of the asshats out there.
People can and do cooperate. Misanthropy is popular amongst young people but it doesn't really reflect on the adult world much. Mercenary, John Galt sorts don't last long in business because they can't work with others and nobody is going to be massively successful entirely on their own.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I reckon a lot of people object to socialism, and in particular communism as practiced in the last century, because of a sense that it's being forced on them.
If it comes about naturally and organically, managing to grow from within the existing economic situation, that's a whole other thing, and much more interesting.
LOL pop game theory!
It is more like the Iterated prisoners dilemma - which produces completely different results.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Let me know how that works out, especially when what you are smoking runs out.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Trumped! ;-)
Think about it, actually I think it would be easy to decide how much to pay the janitor and I bet more than some would say. All the janitor would have to do is stop working. Pretty quickly other workers would have to start cleaning up after themselves, or work in a pig sty. It may not seem like a big deal but many people can work more effectively in a clean environment.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Did I Miss Something?
Or is this to be an Open Company developing and selling Closed (non-Free) Software?
drew
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
When I used Windows I liked Crimson Editor and TextEdit.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
to exorcise simple greed from the human mind as you would exorcising the desire to have sex
greed is greed is greed. monkeys, insects, hell even bacteria understand the notion: get it all for yourself
its an instinctual drive deeper and more rooted in the human mind than any social system you could ever possibly devise. it is not taught. it is organic. children brought up in isolation from any social influence you deem harmful would spontaneously recreate it
so you need to work with greed, because there's no getting rid of it
or choose to reject my words. that's fine. i don't really expect you to listen to me. such is your passion. there are in fact people on this planet who do not want to have sex. asexuality is a real psychological phenomenon. likewise, i believe there are psychological classes of people, such as yourself, who are fanatically altruistic organically. no greed
but the fanatical altruists, and the organically asexual: we are talking about classes of psychology that are firmly and permanently in the minority, and have no hope to influence the majority. not that that will stop you. nor should it
i don't think you should stop with your attempts at creating your visions. why? because your uptopian scheme, like the millions that have come before it and the millions that will come after, they DO serve a valid purpose in society: it keeps people like you occupied in mediocrity and obscurity, and away from real businesses that works and real society that works, where you might do real damage
xoxoxoxoxoxoxox
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Regarding the trust metric and having bias, why not make it anonymous so all reviewing is done in an anonymous manner?
acceptance of ugly truths about your world is just maturity, in my mind
but your permanent infantilization scheme does have some actual evolutionary theory behind it: part of our evolution from earlier simians had to do with the retention of childlike characteristics into adulthood: our minds remain plastic, we can learn for a long time, we are hairless, we have no more prominent brow or jutting jaw. we are in effect, mental and physical monkey babies
however, i still think you are a crackpot. but that shouldn't deter you. go ahead and prove me wrong, and good luck
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
but we have enough trouble with people doing direct rips of our site /without/ providing the source code.
Yeah, I know that GPL uses copyright law too, but the problem is we're dealing all the time with people who don't respect copyright law. Exposing our code would just make it easier for people to rip us off.
Most I can push for at work is "Let's not actively obfuscate anything we're sending over anyway".
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
just make sure you make note of the fact that you are occupied in mediocrity and obscurity replying to said ass ;-)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This isn't the "e" editor, this is something new /usr/ucb/e
-rwxr-xr-x 7 root 204800 Jan 21 1994
what gives?
Well, the headline already got my interest, and surely a lot of yours too. But there are some catches:
1. It's a text editor. Though they probably will have a Linux version soon, it still can't compete with vim / emacs (yea, trying to avoid flame wars, one of them is my favorite).
2. The effort compensation is a bit fuzzy. Trust is a good thing, but putting a working model based on it into reality is a bit hard (see all the trolls on Slashdot, like me).
3. Right now, the site has a bunch of promises, and work in progress plans to implement the open promise. Maybe I'm too cynical with my young years, but I'll only believe it when I can sign up, grab the code, add some useful modifications and see a balance increase on my PayPal account the next month. Not there yet..
4. I'm not quite sure, that even if the idea is good, a Windows based application is the best solution to this kind of project.
Still, I which it will have some success, so people start to think about modes related to this one.
You're absolutely right. Atlas Shrugged does an outstanding job describing Ayn Rand's political philosophy in a clear and memorable way.
Unfortunately, the philosophy itself is crap, which is part of the reason the book is so lousy. A more sane philosophy could have been described using more believable characters.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Another recent publishing success, however, has had more help from Washington, DC, than Hollywood. That book is Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged".
Yeah well, it's still due to the media, even if it's not Hollywood. Atlas Shrugged's recent success isn't due to the economic situation, it's due to conservative pundits mentioning it every time they're on TV when criticizing Obama's "socialist" policies.
Some algorithms will necessarily be easier to game than others, and not everyone will be trying to game the system. Further, some attempts at gamesmanship will be relatively easy to detect, and should be punished.
I think the best way to discourage that sort of behavior is for participants to simply recognize that the company will be less successful if they try to game the system. If you try to take money away from the tech writers to pad the developers' pockets, and that leads to poor documentation, it hurts the business.
Of course, that's only important to those in it for the long haul. So only regular contributors should be in the business of affecting compensation.
This will probably lead to less compensation for new members and one-time contributors. But long-timers should recognize that attracting talent -- especially talent that can make good contributions -- should be a priority.
I don't see that this setup is significantly more doomed than your normal startup.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I've heard that The Turner Diaries is also getting a substantial bump in readership. Keep that in mind when drawing your conclusions.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
You want an open company? Congratulations, you re-discovered anarchism.
The definitive analysis.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I would hardly consider Marx's ideas, on the whole, or the works in which they are presented to be 'wild'. Certainly, some of them are wildly impractical, and in more than a few places his theory is just plain wrong.
That said, however, in the Communist Manifesto Marx outlines a ten-point starting plan:
1. Abolition of property in land (Obviously not.)
2. A heavy progressive income tax (Done)
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance (partially: we have an inheritance tax)
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels (Emigrants, no: criminals, sometimes).
5. Centralization of credit by means of a national bank (Partially, but by no means totally).
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state (Again, partially: transport more than communications).
7. Extension of factories, cultivation of wastelands, and other environmental improvements (Again, partially.)
8. Equal liabity of all to labour, establishment of industrial armies (No.)
9. Combination of agriculture and industry, etc. (No.)
10. Free education, abolition of child labor. (Done).
Out of Marx's ten points, three have been totally ignored, two have been implemented, and the other five are implemented to various degrees. That's pretty successful, isn't it?
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
What will really test whether the Open Company is successful or not is whether (or how) the founder will respond if (likely someday) another person starts to get ranked higher than he. ...But, then, this is generally true in any company, open or not.
On another note, the issue of "less-liked" tasks like "cleaning the bathroom" becomes moot if the metric is designed properly; jobs will start to pay more the more they are needed. In other words, those who like having clean toilets will start to put up their own rank-votes to get the work done. Someone make a pile of shit in the toilet? then rank up the need so that the reward can incentivise motion.
There should be no need to special-case any work. Let the silent and invisible laws of evolution do the work...
marcos
...He comes from the future.
Traditional open source licenses like GPL create a hard-to-cross chasm between it and traditional economics; essentially you can trade code for code, but cannot trade code for anything else (with the traditional medium of that trade being $).
Imagine if some highly successful OSS product "expanded" GPL to include a monetary contribution clause (i.e if you don't want copyleft then just pay X -- instead of contributing code the licensor has the option to contribute money). That money could trivially be used to hire programmers and therefore be converted back into code... or used to pay contributers.
Of course this opens up a huge can of worms, like who gets paid how much (I think that it was very wise for OSS and GPL to steer clear of these issues during its incubation period). As many people have posted, a "trust network" can only be part of the equation... I think that a more quantitative algorithm could be created that captures contributions in code, docs, and community. But the big problem with any quantitative algorithm is that people could change their style to trick the algorithm into thinking they contributed more; for example, to fake out SLOC counts its pretty easy to deliberately write large amounts of code to do small jobs. Enter the trust network; perhaps it can be used to catch and regulate abusers.
I've expanded on the idea in my blog here: http://effluviaofascatteredmind.blogspot.com/2009/03/thoughts-on-gpl-open-company-concept.html. I think I've already exceeded what most slashdot readers really want to read :-).
Govt must regulate market capitalization of all listed companies to TWICE their quarterly revenue.
This will
http://polldaddy.com/p/1322136
Credible
I'd like to hire myself and 4 associates... we have a rock band and need a new practice space and a source of free electricity. We'll even write a jingle for the company in our spare time.
P.S. Is it OK if our drummer Fat Louie and his little brother crash there overnight? They can't afford rent and could act as security guards!
Perhaps this article was posted too soon. A quick trip to the web page states you can download a trial of the software; the full version is thirty-five bucks. No mention of source code anywhere.
That's not open source, more like openly brazen.
Perhaps this is a pre-April Fools gag?
if the mechanism is rigged to work, it just might, you know...
Like software...
Control the process, prevent abuse, and useful results .. result.
Or like the difference between
Rule of "Representatives", and
Rule of Law
IF the mechanisms are in place, and sufficient work goes into making it continue working,
THEN it can create a more functional system/place, for more people, for more time.
IF the rules are allowed to be wrong, then its function will be wrong, same as every other system.
Nature simply kills-off the wrong, and couldn't care less.
Once we let go of protecting the wrong ( because it's ESTABLISHED!! ), then we become more likely to survive, long term.