What Business Can Learn from Open Source

[What Business Can Learn from Open Source]

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| August 2005(This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2005.)Lately companies have been paying more attention to open source.
Ten years ago there seemed a real danger Microsoft would extend its
monopoly to servers. It seems safe to say now that open source has
prevented that. A recent survey found 52% of companies are replacing
Windows servers with Linux servers.
[1]More significant, I think, is which 52% they are. At this point,
anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to
explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon
don't.But the biggest thing business has to learn from open source is not
about Linux or Firefox, but about the forces that produced them.
Ultimately these will affect a lot more than what software you use.We may be able to get a fix on these underlying forces by triangulating
from open source and blogging. As you've probably noticed, they
have a lot in common.Like open source, blogging is something people do themselves, for
free, because they enjoy it. Like open source hackers, bloggers
compete with people working for money, and often win. The method
of ensuring quality is also the same: Darwinian. Companies ensure
quality through rules to prevent employees from screwing up. But
you don't need that when the audience can communicate with one
another. People just produce whatever they want; the good stuff
spreads, and the bad gets ignored. And in both cases, feedback
from the audience improves the best work.Another thing blogging and open source have in common is the Web.
People have always been willing to do great work
for free, but before the Web it was harder to reach an audience
or collaborate on projects.AmateursI think the most important of the new principles business has to learn is
that people work a lot harder on stuff they like. Well, that's
news to no one. So how can I claim business has to learn it? When
I say business doesn't know this, I mean the structure of business
doesn't reflect it.Business still reflects an older model, exemplified by the French
word for working: travailler. It has an English cousin, travail,
and what it means is torture.
[2]This turns out not to be the last word on work, however.
As societies get richer, they learn something about
work that's a lot like what they learn about diet. We know now that the
healthiest diet is the one our peasant ancestors were forced to
eat because they were poor. Like rich food, idleness
only seems desirable when you don't get enough of it. I think we were
designed to work, just as we were designed to eat a certain amount
of fiber, and we feel bad if we don't.There's a name for people who work for the love of it: amateurs.
The word now has such bad connotations that we forget its etymology,
though it's staring us in the face. "Amateur" was originally rather
a complimentary word. But the thing to be in the twentieth century
was professional, which amateurs, by definition, are not.That's why the business world was so surprised by one lesson from
open source: that people working for love often surpass those working
for money. Users don't switch from Explorer to Firefox because
they want to hack the source. They switch because it's a better
browser.It's not that Microsoft isn't trying. They know controlling the
browser is one of the keys to retaining their monopoly. The problem
is the same they face in operating systems: they can't pay people
enough to build something better than a group of inspired hackers
will build for free.I suspect professionalism was always overrated-- not just in the
literal sense of working for money, but also connotations like
formality and detachment. Inconceivable as it would have seemed
in, say, 1970, I think professionalism was largely a fashion,
driven by conditions that happened to exist in the twentieth century.One of the most powerful of those was the existence of "channels." Revealingly,
the same term was used for both products and information: there
were distribution channels, and TV and radio channels.It was the narrowness of such channels that made professionals
seem so superior to amateurs. There were only a few jobs as
professional journalists, for example, so competition ensured the
average journalist was fairly good. Whereas anyone can express
opinions about current events in a bar. And so the average person
expressing his opinions in a bar sounds like an idiot compared to
a journalist writing about the subject.On the Web, the barrier for publishing your ideas is even lower.
You don't have to buy a drink, and they even let kids in.
Millions of people are publishing online, and the average
level of what they're writing, as you might expect, is not very
good. This has led some in the media to conclude that blogs don't
present much of a threat-- that blogs are just a fad.Actually, the fad is the word "blog," at least the way the print
media now use it. What they mean by "blogger" is not someone who
publishes in a weblog format, but anyone who publishes online.
That's going to become a problem as the Web becomes the default
medium for publication. So I'd
like to suggest an alternative word for someone who publishes online.
How about "writer?"Those in the print media who dismiss the writing online because of
its low average quality are missing an important point: no one reads
the average blog. In the old world of channels, it meant something
to talk about average quality, because that's what you were getting
whether you liked it or not.
But now you can read any writer you want. So the average
quality of writing online isn't what the print media are competing
against. They're competing against the best writing online. And,
like Microsoft, they're losing.I know that from my own experience as a reader. Though most print
publications are online, I probably
read two or three articles on individual people's sites for every
one I read on the site of a newspaper or magazine.And when I read, say, New York Times stories, I never reach
them through the Times front page. Most I find through aggregators
like Google News or Slashdot or Delicious. Aggregators show how
much better
you can do than the channel. The New York Times front page is
a list of articles written by people who work for the New York Times. Delicious
is a list of articles that are interesting. And it's only now that
you can see the two side by side that you notice how little overlap there is.Most articles in the print media are boring. For example, the
president notices that a majority of voters now think invading Iraq
was a mistake, so he makes an address to the nation to drum up
support. Where is the man bites dog in that? I didn't hear the
speech, but I could probably tell you exactly what he said. A
speech like that is, in the most literal sense, not news: there is
nothing new in it.
[3]Nor is there anything new, except the names and places, in most
"news" about things going wrong. A child is abducted; there's a
tornado; a ferry sinks; someone gets bitten by a shark; a small
plane crashes. And what do you learn about the world from these
stories? Absolutely nothing. They're outlying data points; what
makes them gripping also makes them irrelevant.As in software, when professionals produce such crap, it's not
surprising if amateurs can do better. Live by the channel, die by
the channel: if you depend on an oligopoly, you sink into bad habits
that are hard to overcome when you suddenly get competition.
[4]WorkplacesAnother thing blogs and open source software have in common is that
they're often made by people working at home. That may not seem
surprising. But it should be. It's the architectural equivalent
of a home-made aircraft shooting down an F-18. Companies spend
millions to build office buildings for a single purpose: to be a
place to work. And yet people working in their own homes,

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