Driving back from the office on Tuesday I happened to catch the tail end of “Inside the Virtual Anthill: Open Source Means Business” on Radio 4. The program explored the “alternative way of working” that is open source development with distributed teams of contributors scattered across the globe, connected by the internet with little or no centralised direction or coordination.
The programme title is a reference to ant colonies where no individual ant directs the behaviour of others – that’s very un-ant-like apparently – instead ants are influenced by those around them. It’s a slightly leaky analogy as ants haven’t yet developed a sophisticated long-range communications infrastructure (sukz to be an ant, unable to watch silly cat videos). They can only be influenced by those in close proximity. The interconnectedness of the human equivalent shrinks the geography dramatically.
The program sets to one side the question of “free software” (perhaps refreshingly recognising the distinction between “free software” and OSS (open source software)) and instead focuses on organisational aspects, the adoption of open source approaches by commercial software companies and the application of open source techniques to fields beyond software development (eg Wikipedia, mining for gold and solving challenging problems).
Mike Shaver, VP of Engineering for Mozilla Corporation gave his definition of open source:
“the components of the software … are available for others to see, and importantly also to change and make their own.”
Seems like an entirely reasonable definition. No mention of “free as in beer”, no suggestion that only open source software is “open” software (ie software you can extend, enhance or interoperate with). Whether a particular piece of software makes a great basis for the world-conquering uber-app you’re about to create is independent of whether or not it’s proprietary. The same is true of paying for it. Some proprietary software is free just as some open source software is paid-for. (I’ll now take credit for clearing up that issue once and for all and the internet can now get on with life)
The question of WIFM (What’s in it for me?) cropped up a couple of times. Why do people devote time, energy and expertise to these various pursuits? Interestingly (and a little sadly), in the case of Wikipedia, a good number of people apparently devote themselves to trying to “ruin it for the majority” by engaging in vandalism or becoming pre-occupied with “edit wars”.
It makes you wonder if similar behaviour occurs in other fields. Are there rogue open source contributors out there trying to ruin it for the rest of us? If not, why not? Wikipedia’s immediacy makes it an easy target (there’s talk of change). Does a stricter review process weed-out such undesirables from other fields? Is the higher barrier-to-entry acting as a disincentive? Or is the population of software developers simply more warm-hearted, law-abiding and well-meaning than the general population? I suspect not.
There was an interesting foray into other applications of open source techniques including the story of Goldcorp told by founder Rob McEwen. Goldcorp offered a challenge to the community: we’ll share all the data we have on our gold mine if you tell us where we’re likely to find more gold. There’s not much incentive there for people so a prize fund totalling over $500,000 was offered (that’s the WIFM box checked). It was a controversial but successful experiment with over 1400 downloads of the dataset and significant finds at the locations suggested by the winners. Perhaps there is something in this. Local government too was mentioned as a rich seam of potential for open source collaborative working. Often similar projects are duplicated over and over in each county / state. it seems to me though, that what’s preventing that from happening today is some centralised direction and control, supposedly the antithesis of open source.
Professor Thomas Malone of the MIT Sloan School of Management and author of The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life talked of the evolution of business from the traditional, large-scale hierarchical organisations of today to more networked, decentralised and democratic organisations of tomorrow. He argues that you can achieve the economic benefits of large organisations while also enjoying the more human benefits of small organisations such as freedom, flexibility, motivation, creativity and cites Wikipedia as an example: “An amazing organisational invention”.
I’m happy to accept that Wikipedia is an amazing organisational invention. But a blueprint for future businesses? For one thing the argument is based on a false premise: that traditional organisations can’t support freedom, flexibility, motivation and creativity. I see plenty of all those things around Microsoft and we’re not unique in that. Those things can survive and even thrive in a large organisation.
But if I build my business on the open source model, what about practical issues like revenue and remuneration. I’m assuming we’re not talking of a utopian vision where everyone works for the common good and shares in the fruits of their labours. Software development costs a lot of money. Someone, somewhere has to pay. Firefox (250+ employees at Mozilla Corporation and upwards of $50M in revenue from Google in 2006) and Linux (the 4-500 IBM employees mentioned in the programme you can be sure are being rolled into those IBM hardware costs and service agreements) aren’t free. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just a different form of payment.
I’m assuming our business is in business to make some money and the people that do work for us have families to feed. How would that work? Who would determine how people were rewarded? Who would be the arbiter? Who would do the “back-room” work that’s essential when people are “in employment”? Who would decide the relative value of these different functions? Surely we’re already starting to introduce some of the infrastructure that supports today’s traditional organisations (and perhaps, the argument goes, inhibits them). I see no way around this. What I do see is both models embracing aspects of the other.
We see a move in “traditional” organisations to become more decentralised, less dependent on location and embracing new ways of working while at the same time the open source examples given in the programme (such as Mozilla and IBM) actually use a hybrid model with some centralised, controlled resources supported by a broader community of contributors. Perhaps in 10 years time we’ll find ourselves unable to make the distinction and wonder what all the fuss was about?
You can listen to the programme in full on BBC iPlayer (UK only).
