Interactive Publishing - Executive Summary (8) - Open Source

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Executive Summary

His story is the story of how Linux was developed in a way contrary to every known guideline and "rule" about how to develop quality software. The old model doesn't work, the existing Windows operating system is not reliable, that was the starting position. (His Linux operating system only crashed on him twice in the last six years he told the envious audience)

The evolution of Linux is similar to the evolution of the Internet -- the success factors as Raymond sees them are:
1) release early/ release often
2) publish source code and solicit feedback because "most of the smart people in the world work somewhere else."
3) praise/ reward people in public

It is worth exploring this last notion also in respect to content development and user interaction: classical ways to motivate people don't work on the Internet. He pointed to two classical methods of motivation:
1) coercion-- this doesn't work in the Internet because you cannot hold a gun to someone's
head through a T1(E1) line.
2) offering them a scarce resource such as money or computing power-- for people such as scientists and programmers and creative minds this method holds not much fascination. What works is peer esteem and praise.

The "bazaar" model is to encourage the whole world to get involved. Get enough eyeballs and the finding of bugs in software gets easy.

Raymond said, "The majority of programmers are producing software for use value only. That is, they are not producing software to be sold commercially but rather to get certain function to work within an existing software environment. Commercially sold software is actually only an issue for about 5% of software programmers."

When it came to discussion about revenues and business models, Raymond suggested that software is a service industry that has been mistakenly thought of as a manufacturing
business.

His last point was that plagiarism is not really an issue anymore. Copying someone else's idea or innovation costs a lot of money in resources. By the time one has caught up with the leader, the leader has moved on anyway. (That notion would go undisputed were it not for the "patent mania" regarding the internet. Over 6000 patents relating to the internet have been issued in the US in 1999. The web consortium as well as the linux pioneers feel that the patent war will stifle development of good software and software concepts for the internet. So the leaders will not have moved further ? but rather planted themselves as stumbling stones in the middle of the path. If you are curious check what for example Amazon.com has patented at the US trademark and patent office , http://www.uspto.gov/)

Another, very important, reason why open source is emerging is that software architectures and the tasks that software is being asked to carry out are increasingly complex. ERP software, for example, used by large organisations is notoriously complex. The only way to handle that kind of complexity is with an open system of loosely connected modules (does that remind anybody of the growing complexity of available content?)

Can the open source philosophy be applied to content providers?
Raymond said that opening up can give you control. A big, if not the central issue, dispassionately uttered. The discussion from the floor tried to clarify the model for content providers but was a bit inconclusive.

However there are highly successful examples like http://www.slashdot.org the magazine for nerds by nerds, that indicate that producing content by involving smart readers is a terribly clever way to go. Other examples include http://www.epinions.com or http://www.about.com, sites that rely almost exclusively on "open source" content production. And then there are the very successful local publishers who have found a way to get all the community groups and associations with a homepage on their site.