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What Business Can Learn from Open Source 245

Posted by Zonk from the lots-of-elbow-grease-makes-things-go dept.
dtolton writes "Paul Graham has written a fantastic article on what businesses can learn from Open Source. He covers why Amateurs can outperform Professionals, why the home is a better work environment than the office, and how bottom up ideas are better than top down. Finally he ties these lessons into the business relationship." Derived from a talk at Oscon 2005. From the article: "...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."
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What Business Can Learn from Open Source

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  • Home ! Office (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gothmolly ( 148874 ) on Thursday August 04, 2005 @08:29AM (#13238690)
    The problem with the "I can be more productive at home" argument is that it blurs still further the distinction between work and personal life. IT people are already subject to odd-hours, psuedo or real on-call schedules, VPN access "just to check your email", etc.
    People need to stop this trend - its not healthy. When I walk out the door of my job, I'm done. They pay me for 40 hours a week, and they get it. No more. If I work an extra 4 hours a week at home, I just gave myself a 10% pay cut.
    • Lazy bum clockwatcher. Your job is to get your work done.

    • Re:Home ! Office (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Freexe ( 717562 ) <serrkr@tznvy.pbz> on Thursday August 04, 2005 @08:35AM (#13238720) Homepage
      If you work an extra 4 hours a week, but safe $100 and 5-10 hours a week on travel. Plus get to see your family during the day, cook yourself a decent meal at lunch time and be in a more relaxed atmosphere, do you still class that as a pay cut?
      • All I can think of is how Homer worked at home and how well that went, unfortunatly there are people like that in the world. Besides that who wants to get yelled at by their boss and wife in the same hour.

        • Re:Home ! Office (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Malyven ( 774978 )
          If your wife has never yelled at you over the phone in the office you obviously haven't been married that long. All this would do is reverse it, and I don't know about you but I would much rather look at my wife while she is yelling at me and my boss is yelling in the phone than vice versa.

    • Re:Home ! Office (Score:4, Interesting)

      by cazzazullu ( 645423 ) on Thursday August 04, 2005 @08:36AM (#13238724)
      Well, as this may be true for you, I just like my job. I can wake up in the morning before my wakeup alarm starts, and jump out of bed, thinking "wow I wish I already was at my desk, so I can continue what I was doing yesterday". Yes I have flexible hours and can start whenever I want. Yes I work too much each and every day. No I don't get paid more because of this. But most important: No I don't mind doing this, I even like it. But I must be an exception...

      • Re:Home ! Office (Score:3, Insightful)

        by aussie_a ( 778472 )
        But I must be an exception...

        Getting a job is easier then getting a job you like AND can support your family on (both financially and mentally). I wouldn't say you're an exception, but I think it's safe to say there are plenty of people who aren't in your circumstance.

        Working at home, doing overtime for "fun", etc do suit those who have their dream job. But for the rest, this expectation would be a nightmare. And no, getting your dream job isn't possible for everyone. But for those who do have it, I e
      • Your boss read Slashdot, doesn't he? Fess up!!!

      • Re:Home ! Office (Score:3, Interesting)

        by TheBracket ( 307388 )
        The thing to watch out for with this setup is burnout. I really love my job, but several years of throwing myself into 60+ hours/week was really taking its toll last year. I'm lucky enough to have a very understanding boss, who considers me vital to the company - so he restructured my department a bit, gave me an assistant, and helped me setup a home office. Now I work a more comfortable 35-40 hours per week, from a spare room in my house converted into an office. My productivity has actually gone up, and l

    • Re:Home ! Office (Score:4, Insightful)

      by turlingdrome ( 857230 ) on Thursday August 04, 2005 @08:41AM (#13238745)
      Quality of life has to be taken into consideration as part of compensation. If your quality of life improves significantly as a result of not having to commute into an office and play office politics, this can be worth a good sum of money to many people.

    • Re:Home ! Office (Score:3, Insightful)

      by D-Cypell ( 446534 )
      They pay me for 40 hours a week, and they get it. No more.

      Which is great until your employer finds someone who is prepared to work 60 hour weeks for the same money.

      The quality of you work may be far higher, but many employers dont recognise quality the same way that you and I may. Mainly because quantity is a much easier thing to measure and place on fancy looking spreadsheets.

      • Re:Home ! Office (Score:5, Insightful)

        by samjam ( 256347 ) on Thursday August 04, 2005 @08:58AM (#13238826) Homepage Journal
        You raise a good point.

        Some bosses want "work", some bosses want "results".

        My boss wants "results" and gets them. They are ingenious results and he wouldn't get these from someone whose qualification was merely being willing to work 60 hours a week for the same pay.

        I get my results Feynman style by thinking, walking around and trying things out, by reading slashdot and freshmeat and seeing whats going on.

        I work for a small company, I think it makes a difference.

        Sam
        • Murray Gell-Mann must have been mistaken when he famously described Feynman's problem solving algorithm as: (1) write down the problem; (2) think very hard; (3) write down the answer.

          You're telling us that Gell-Mann meant to say: (1) think; (2) walk around and try things out; (3) read slashdot and freshmeat and see what's going on.

          Somehow, I don't think that the Feynmen of today have much to fear.

      • Re:Home ! Office (Score:2, Interesting)

        by mdwh2 ( 535323 )
        And what happens when your employer finds someone who is prepared to work 40 hour weeks for half the money?

        I'm from a land where you can't be fired for no reason, and I'm not sure what things are like in the US - is there pressure for everyone to take pay cuts? My impression was that this isn't the case (indeed, the US tends to have higher salaries than elsewhere), so I wonder why people fear they need to work as many hours as possible, but they don't feel pressured into taking a pay cut?
        • You can not be fired in the U.S. for no reason. The thing is though, employers will make up reasons or find some way to get rid of you while fitting within the bounds of law. For example, I was working for a company that got bought out. I was one of a very small handful of veteran employees, and got paid well because I was also one of their top persons. They fired me on the claim that I was one minute late to work. They had a team of lawyers prepared to fight me on it when I attempted to draw unemploym
    • ..who hates their job.

      I enjoy coding, and the stuff I code at work is very interesting and challenging. When I was unemployed for 6 months 2 years ago, guess what I did with my free time - code!

      You think professional golfers just quit at the end of the tournament and say tripe like "if I golf 10 hours in my free time, I just got a 10% paycut!"

      Have fun hating your job, working the bare minimum, and never getting ahead. Meanwhile I will keep enjoying my job, getting ahead, and when I am 45 I will be sipping

      • Re:Sounds like the attitude of someone... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Some people live to work.
        Others work to live.

        I learned some time ago that one group has a hard time understanding the motivations of the other.
      • If you think working hard will get you ahead, then you have not been working in corporate America. Kissing ass, schmoozing, and making friends is how you get ahead. The old saying, "It's not WHAT you know, it's WHO you know" is very true.

        Hating your job may not be the right answer, but either is being an overachiever. See your job for what it is -- a means to an end. Work your 40 hours a week, make sure you go out for beer regularly with the boss, and watch your career advance.

      • when I am 45 I will be sipping on a margarita in the bahamas while you are still working 40 hours a week to make rent.

        Not likely. While I completely agree with your work ethic I hope you don't really expect to be independently wealthy at 45. Besides, as someone who spent his unemployed days coding you probably would not be happy sitting on the beach all day.
      • No, it sounds like the attitude of someone who has their life together. Work doesn't own me. I sell a small amount of my time to them, in order to get the money to do what I want the rest of the time. They pay for 40 hours, they get 40 hours. If they want more- well, they can find someone else. My free time is important to me, and I won't give it up for any reason.

        Don't get me wrong- I enjoy coding. I do it in my free time even with a coding job. But when I code on my own time, I code what I want to

    • Re:Home ! Office (Score:4, Interesting)

      by SatanicPuppy ( 611928 ) <SatanicpuppyNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday August 04, 2005 @09:06AM (#13238859) Journal
      It's crap anyway. When I work at home, I'm not as productive as when I'm at the office. If I need to put in more than forty hours, I go back to the office on saturday.

      Anything else, and I end up time sharing between working and fragging...One day I'd get teamspeak confused with my hands-free phone and call my boss a spawn camping n00b lamer, and that would be it.

      I'll tell ya though, I hated being freelance. There was no "at work" and no "off work" there was just work, and everytime I sat in front of the computer it would reproach me.

      • Re:Home ! Office (Score:4, Interesting)

        by tclark ( 140640 ) on Thursday August 04, 2005 @10:54AM (#13239519) Homepage
        I used to go to the office on Saturday too. It was my most productive time, since there were no interupptions from coworkers.

        Now I work from home, and every day is like that.

        • Re:Home ! Office (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Nevyn ( 5505 ) *

          Yeh, I think that's the main point the above posters have missed. If you normally "work" at a seperate location, then trying to work at home is going to be a bad experience ... much like the couple of times a year I have to goto an office, my chair; desk; computer; everything is wrong.

          The same with the "I only work 40 hrs a week, so don't work at home" reply ... sure, so do I (on average), but I never do 40 hours by working 9-5, 5 days a week, with an hour for lunch -- in other words, being able to work 1

      • It all depends on what kind of "work" office you have. If you're crammed into a cube with 3 other occupants (and I've seen & endured far worse), with 4 sets of phones, beepers, guests intruding on your concentration, then maybe a "home" office would work better for you.

        If your "home" office is not exactly a fortress of solitude, such that you can't get work done there due to the distractions of phone, kids, or any of a number of other things that can break you out of work mode, then maybe an away-from-
    • Attitude like that will get you replaced with a short Perl script.... :)

      Personally if I work 50 hrs, I make sure that the extra 10 are on something that will grow me as an programmer, person, ect.... If I can not "justify" is as a personal investment I won't do it...

    • Distinction between work and personal life (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Skinny Rav ( 181822 ) on Thursday August 04, 2005 @09:17AM (#13238905)
      Distinction between work and personal life is a very fresh concept, connected with capitalism and work for hire. As someone already mentioned it does not exist if you run a restaurant. It doesn't exist if you are a farmer. Hell, it probably doesn't exist if you run any kind of private small-scale businness.

      It didn't exist in pre-capitalism era: families worked together, dined together. Even if you were hired, quite often your brother/sister worked at the same place. Women were taking their babies to work or were gathering together to spin wool or linen, to sew and so on.

      So it seems that this distinction was artificial and caused by a fact that if some people have to be in the same physical location to work and they have to commute - it is more efficient to separate their work time and leisure time. But with introduction of modern communication methods more and more jobs take different trend: work at home, feel comfortable, manage your time yourself, your employer is only interested in results, not means. And this means switch from time based work to task based work - which in fact is a return to natural state.

      Wouldn't you like to spend your day at home, with your family, just retreating to your home office if you need to focus a bit more on work, have a lunch at home with your wife and kids than to commute everyday, order a pizza for lunch, and then spend an hour and a half driving back home? Do you like explaining to your boss that you have to take a day-off because of some reconstruction in your house or something?

      With a laptop I can do my work while laying on my sofa and listening to my favourite music on my home stereo - and that is when I am really productive.

      Cheers

      Raf
    • I actually get more thinking done on the subway during the commute. If I could dispense with the ten hours per week plus the 40 hour wasted there,I'd actully be much further ahead.

      Meanwhile, I tried to telecommute for a week while telling my boss that I had pneumonia. I got more done in that week in my underwear than in the rest of the month. He still insisted that I haul my carcass in thought and my productivity went up in smoke.
    • From the article:

      I had the misfortune to participate in what amounted to a controlled experiment to prove that. After Yahoo bought our startup I went to work for them. I was doing exactly the same work, except with bosses. And to my horror I started acting like a child: I became sullen and rebellious.

    • Re:Home ! Office (Score:4, Insightful)

      by An Onerous Coward ( 222037 ) on Thursday August 04, 2005 @11:01AM (#13239593) Homepage
      You seriously didn't have time to read the article, did you? The part about working from home was just one part of a much larger solution, and without bringing the rest of it along, working at home just takes you from a bad face-to-face relationship to a bad long-distance relationship.

      The problem is, you have a job where you're doing things you wouldn't do unless you were paid for it. Because of this, employers try to make you efficient by setting up your workplace so as to make it unconducive for anything enjoyable. People hold meetings so that they can look busy. Productivity plummets.

      Yes, it's unhealthy when work starts creeping into non-work time. But that's because most people consider their jobs to be soul-sucking drudgery. If you really enjoy what you do, you don't have to draw a sharp, 40 hour line in the sand, or consider a few extra hours to be time deducted from your real life.

      Anyways, the point is that the article isn't just suggesting "working from home", but is suggesting a wide variety of options for reworking the currently wasteful and sterile employer/employee relationship into something both more productive and fulfilling for both.
    • Where the article fails is in its assumption that merely working at home is the key. It is not. It's the fact that you're working for yourself doing what you want to do when you want to do at your own pace, that is the key. Upon this simple fact his whole thesis falls apart.

      No matter how liberal a company's telecommuting policy is, a company can never reproduce the dynamics that led to Linux, KDE, Apache, Python, etc. That's not to say that businesses shouldn't be involved in Open Source, or are unable to p
  • Or Open Source similar to blogging? I just saw that and my vision went blurry... Blogs are just web pages that people update everyday or so... WTF!? BLOG!? I hate that word. It's just stupid.

  • Open Source == Bored technical professionals (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bessel ( 824697 ) on Thursday August 04, 2005 @08:33AM (#13238711)
    One thing that businesses can learn from open source is that properly motivated employees can produce great things. Here we have a group of technical professionals working for free to produce great software. Employers on the other hand, have a difficult time motivating people who they pay. Motivation == productivity.

    • Not quite (Score:3, Insightful)

      by DogDude ( 805747 )
      This group of technical professionals are doing a hobby they enjoy. That's it. It really doesn't have anything to do with work. Would you like to explain how somebody who works in, say, insurance could be more inspired by his employer, given that his hobby is model trains? What they do on their own time is completely unrelated to work.
    • > properly motivated employees can
      > produce great things

      And, conversely, unmotivated or badly motivated employees generally cannot. This isn't an absolute... even a blind dog finds a bone once in a while... but it's certainly not sustainable.

      Brilliant article. I'm going to go BLOG about it!

  • Scary (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Ultimately these will affect a lot more than what software you use.

    From my own observations, this part is very true but, not in the way you think. Rather than ushering in a new revenue stream, open source destroys revenue streams. So far, there are only two companies that will even claim to have made a profit from open source. They are IBM, who may have reason to fudge the numbers, and Red Hat, who claims to have scraped some skin from its teeth. All the others are either losing money or folding.

    Now, before
    • They have fewer admin people fewer accountants, fewer IT people. They benefit from economies of scale and have lower overall overhead. Lots of small companies means higher employment rather than lower.

       

    • Re:Scary (Score:5, Insightful)

      by UtucXul ( 658400 ) on Thursday August 04, 2005 @09:19AM (#13238913) Homepage
      So far, there are only two companies that will even claim to have made a profit from open source. They are IBM, who may have reason to fudge the numbers, and Red Hat, who claims to have scraped some skin from its teeth. All the others are either losing money or folding.
      Is that really a fair thing to say? Apple has used a ton of open source programs for OSX (even though the final product also contains lots of non-free stuff). And they have made money.

      Google uses Linux which is free to make money. Tivo use Linux (although I don't know if they actually make money. Linksys sells (and I assume does pretty well) products like the WRT54g which run Linux.

      I don't want to go crazy with examples, but the point is that lots of companies make money off of free software and some of them probably even give things back, they just don't always make money the way you expect a software company would.

      • Re:Scary (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Donny Smith ( 567043 )
        >Is that really a fair thing to say?

        It's not, but for different reasons (in my view). IBM, in my view, is selling snake oil (give you a "free" Linux, then rip you off on everything else). Red Hat is probably the only noteworthy example.

        Tivo is making money not from Linux but from their product (which incidentally runs on Linux), but could have made money using any other OS (BSD or even some commercial embedded OS).
        The same goes for Google (just look at Yahoo - I think they're big on *BSD).

        I think making
    • All those evil scientist making their research publicly available are destroying revenue streams!!! We must stop them, think of the revenue streams, they are defenseless.

      What's that, increased overall efficiency? Better standards of living... My... Those don't matter, they arn't revenue streams.
    • Open source is shaking up the business world alright but, it looks like it is going to make a lot of people homeless.

      That is only true if you:
      a) Are so narrowly skilled, you can't find a job in another field.
      b) Aren't good enough to beat the competition and get a job.

      My dad once worked scoping radio tubes. My mom once punched punchcards (no, not programmed). They didn't become homeless when their jobs got obsolete. After the dotcom boom there was one hell of a surplus of web developers. The net result was t

  • Darwinian... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Vo0k ( 760020 ) on Thursday August 04, 2005 @08:35AM (#13238717) Journal
    Yes, the best blogs spreat, the worse ones get forgotten. But the worst ones [mylog.pl] can cost you a breakfast.

  • Motivation is the key (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Escribano ( 902302 ) on Thursday August 04, 2005 @08:40AM (#13238740) Homepage
    There'sa lot of people in the open source community who work with motivation and fun. That's the key in my opinion.

    If the great industries care about his employees, they should be a lot more productive

  • Middle Ground (Score:2, Insightful)

    by SolarCanine ( 892620 )
    As the author of TFA states, changes to our cultural ideas of "how things get done" are indeed glacial. But that's no reason that business in the 21st Century can't take a couple small steps in the right direction.

    I have been lucky enough in the past to work for a forward-thinking company that understood that allowing their employees to follow the threads of their own ideas could be enormously profitable overall to the company. Job descriptions are far too restrictive, IMHO, and should only be used as

    • Big assumption (Score:3, Interesting)

      by DogDude ( 805747 )
      You're assuming that you're talking to people who all work for mega-corporations with thousands of employees that can afford to let their emplyoees tinker on company time. I think that's a bit unrealistic. I know that when I hire somebody, I have a job for them to do. I simply cannot afford to have them playing around, hoping to come up with some great idea that's unrelated to my business.

      • Re:Big assumption (Score:3, Insightful)

        by SolarCanine ( 892620 )
        Actually, one of the most liberal-minded companies I've ever done work for had under 100 employees. But they understood that allowing me some flexibility paid off in the long run. And, to be quite honest, I ended up putting in more than 40 hours a week because of it. Overall, I'd say they came out way ahead compared to trying to turn me into one of the masses who feel like watching clocks and rushing the parking lot are the norm.

  • Put more accurately... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dasher42 ( 514179 ) on Thursday August 04, 2005 @08:45AM (#13238765)
    why Amateurs can outperform Professionals

    I think the article and the facts on the ground would justify rephrasing this as "why professional programmers get better results on their free time, without pointyhairs, committees, and marketing droids in their way".

    • Re:Put more accurately... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Shotgun ( 30919 ) on Thursday August 04, 2005 @11:51AM (#13240368)
      Amateurs 'can' always outperform Professionals.

      The Amateur only has to make a product.
      The Professional also has to make a living.

    • The definition of Amateur compared to Professional, is that Professionals get paid, Amateurs do not.

      We've picked up a different meaning now thinking that an Amateur somehow has an inferior ability to a Professional, but it's not true.

      The original meaning still holds in the athletic world. Many Olympic sports have the requirement that the entrants be Amateurs, and that they cannot be Professionals. Or they have limits on just how Professional they can be.

      This is why many ice skaters cannot compete anymore

  • Startups "won't hurt as much?" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DogDude ( 805747 ) on Thursday August 04, 2005 @08:49AM (#13238779)
    This guy is really insulting. He says that failing your own business "won't hurt as much." as having a real job? To say that investing every dime you own in a business, and spending every day for several years (most businesses fold in the 1-3 year range), only to see it fail "won't hurt as much" as working as a job that may not be 100% rewarding is pure bullshit.
    Actually, I'd say it's this cavalier attitude about business that causes many startups to fail.

    It sounds like he's suggesting that developers work at home, develop open source, and pay their rent with what? fairy dust? good will?

    Another thing that keeps people away from starting startups is the risk. Someone with kids and a mortgage should think twice before doing it. But most young hackers have neither.

    And as the example of open source and blogging suggests, you'll enjoy it more, even if you fail. You'll be working on your own thing, instead of going to some office and doing what you're told. There may be more pain in your own company, but it won't hurt as much.

    • Re:Startups "won't hurt as much?" (Score:5, Insightful)

      by pjkundert ( 597719 ) on Thursday August 04, 2005 @09:19AM (#13238912) Homepage
      I think you perhaps misunderstand Mr. Graham. Yes, failing at your own business won't hurt as much as being a failure, working at a job.

      As someone who invested 6 years, and about $250,000 worth of lost earning potential into a business, I can honestly say that I agree with him, 100%.

      I wouldn't trade my experience running that business for that $250,000, if you tried to give me the cash. Now that I am back at a programming "Job", I treat it completely differently than I did before I had a business. I find that I worry much less, too -- once you've come close to living in a gutter, there's not much that is "threatening" about a boss!

      He does say that someone with Kids and a Mortgage should think twice. So, all in all, Mr. Graham's article was very even-handed in its comparison of Jobs vs. Start-ups.

    • It sounds like he's suggesting that developers work at home, develop open source, and pay their rent with what? fairy dust? good will?

      Yeah they obviously have no clue how much fairy dust goes for these days. Incidentally I use pixie dust which is far cheaper, but I swear you'll never be able to tell the difference.

  • Don't count the pros out. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DingerX ( 847589 ) on Thursday August 04, 2005 @08:49AM (#13238784) Journal
    Yeah, but the best open source products have people involved who are paid for their time in working on it.

    Amateurs are great, and amateur drive is an amazing thing -- it's enabled me to produce software of a quality and sophistication that a "professional operation" couldn't match for anywhere near the price.

    But the "great advantage" of amateurs -- they work better at projects they love, without bosses -- is also their great shortcoming. As a rule, amateurs don't do the crap work. Most amateurs, being their own bosses, won't do, or do inadequately the pain-in-the-ass parts of the job. Check grammar on a weblog? Make the GUI useful and intuitive to an average user? Hang around and get the damn thing finished? Ensure that your startup has a legally sound foundation?

    In short, discipline is something amateurs as a group lack, and that's something some of those fancy degrees teach : to achieve something, you can't just do the stuff you like.

    As far as meetings go, well sure, meetings are to be abhorred by any sensible person. That's also why in Universities (where you get your fancy degrees) we teach people to break up in arbitrary small groups and work on a project. The smart ones figure out pretty quick that small group work sucks and determine to avoid such situations, or make them as functional as possible.

    And well, yeah, it sucks being a wage slave, but most jobs are just that: jobs, and for lazy-ass amateurs like me to live our lives, we need an infrastructure of people who work for a living.

    • Re:Don't count the pros out. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by RichDice ( 7079 ) on Thursday August 04, 2005 @10:58AM (#13239552)

      As far as meetings go, well sure, meetings are to be abhorred by any sensible person. That's also why in Universities (where you get your fancy degrees) we teach people to break up in arbitrary small groups and work on a project. The smart ones figure out pretty quick that small group work sucks and determine to avoid such situations, or make them as functional as possible.

      Any kind of work can suck. Therefore, group project work can suck. But it can also rock. While there are some random elements nudging such work on the sucks/rocks continuum, I think the majority of it is systematic. That is, it sucks or rocks in direct proportion to your own actions within such groups.

      Notice that I didn't say "in direct proportion to the actions of all the people within such groups." You -- each and every individual -- has the capability to turn pretty much any group into a functioning group.

      The fact of the matter is that most people are poor at interacting in group work -- that is, maximizing their own potential within the group, and maximizing the potential of the group.

      Everyone pines to end up on the team in which, by luck, everyone gets along well and works hard and competently and things just end up going great. (I think this usually happens in the context of self-selected groups with high barriers to entry; I'll give an example of this that I've seen recently later.) These teams happen, but rarely. You're a sucker to wait for such things to happen. Make the team work.

      To try to put this all in context, I'll provide a few examples here that I've experienced in the realms of university, working life and Open Source projects, and also tag on a few academic references at the bottom.

      My undergraduate degree was astronomy. (Undergraduate astronomy is basically an amalgam of compsci, physics and applied maths.) Group work was mandatory in that program simply because the problem sets (with about 2 due a week) were far too big and difficult for any of us to regularly be able to individually complete. So we did a lot of group meetings to work out the problems. Sometimes they were "sharing" meetings, where we'd each get a question or two on our own and bring them all together in the end, hopefully with enough time left over for each to present a mini-lecture on the thought processes that led to the solution (without which you'd be pretty much toast when the same kind of question appeared on an exam), but occasionally a problem would be too difficult for any of us to solve individually and we'd have to group-work a single problem together. (Or maybe get it from the notes of someone a year or two ahead of us. :-) ) This worked out pretty well, but this is probably an example of people who are naturally hard working and intelligent self-selecting themselves into the group. (You don't take undergrad astrononmy by accident, after all.)

      Fast forward 7 years... and now I'm in a top-tier MBA program. The differences between the programs are enormous. There are 330 people in my year, not 8. People come from a wide variety of backgrounds and there is a wide variety of skills, both kinds of skill and amounts of skill. Group work is built into the program at a dozen different levels rather than just being something that happens "by accident." We don't have 4 years to get to know each other and learn how to work with each other (and build up levels of trust and game-theoretic dynamics): some groups are meant to last for several months, others for several hours. And guess what -- they all worked out great. Sure, there was an occasional slacker (be it for reasons of disposition, or because they had a death in the family so they had to run off for personal reasons, thus leaving the rest of us to pick up their slack), but it didn't happen all that often and it was never anything that the rest of us couldn't reasonably absorb. With pretty much every group project my teams managed to find a way to make things work ou

    • meetings are to be abhorred by any sensible person

      I'm with you on that, I strongly believe that any meeting over an hour long is one that the leader hasn't prepared for sufficiently. I also find that getting two or three people together and stepping outside for a moment generates better results than formal meetings.

      I found it interesting that the author of the article described meetings as "cozy", and felt like he was getting away with something because he didn't have to work. That hardly speaks of a good

  • open source != home hackers (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rapiddescent ( 572442 ) on Thursday August 04, 2005 @08:52AM (#13238793)
    I don't know why people (such as in TFA) presume that all open source coders are amateur home coders. Take a look through at a kernel changelog and you'll see many email addresses of individuals at IBM, HP, SGI, SuSE, Redhat, Intel, Nokia to name just organisations I recognise in the first 15% of the 2.6.11 kernel changelog. Commercial organisations recognise that by contributing to OSS projects they are enhancing their reputation, selling orthoganal products and retaining key staff for the benefit of the organisation.

    I think the important part of OSS is that teams are built on individuals' technical ability rather than race, creed, colour or indeed paymaster.

    rd

    • And that percentage of organization in the kernel changelog is good to kernel development, because a professional paid for his work by an organization will do what he is said to do, particularly those kind of works noone else will do because they're boring.

      A problem with most (small, not the kernel of course ;)) open source projects is that no developers will do some of the essential, but boring , not exciting and unpopular tasks. Then, since someone has to do those tasks, the admin does all of them, doing
    • I think the real question isn't "Are these people Amateur Coders or paid?" but "When they started coding this project were they Amateur Coders or paid ones?". It would be interesting to know wether the paid coders worked for those companies from the beginning of their contribution to the Open Source project or did they start out in their free time as well.

  • code permanence is the key (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RealityProphet ( 625675 ) on Thursday August 04, 2005 @08:55AM (#13238810)

    It is not that open source software can outperform professionally-written software. It is most often the case that a piece of nice commercial software is written and the open source community tries to replicate it for free. The reason that they can come up with so many quality, open source alternatives is because they have no timeline. Nobody bats an eye that it took the open source community 5 years to come up with a competitor to IE6. Nobody cares about that (it's free, after all, quit complaining!).

    Rather, it is the case that code that is well written, only needs to be written once. Take the gecko rendering engine, for instance. How many open source browsers use it? And once a quality piece of core software is written, it doesn't need to be written again! So, it may take the open source community years to come up with a solution, but once it's there, it isn't going anywhere.

    You can see this happening with kde and gnome, too. They aren't quite as user-friendly or as stable as their commercial counterparts, but once they get there, unless the desktop paradigm changes, then the OSS community will have their free desktop alternative.

  • Why amateurs outperform professionals (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Linus Torvaalds ( 876626 ) on Thursday August 04, 2005 @08:58AM (#13238823)

    The first reason is that many, many businesses are focused on building what the customers ask for. Clue number one: customers know fuck all about building software. If they were remotely clued in, they wouldn't need to ask somebody else to build it, would they?

    So customers ask for stupid things. That's what makes them customers. The problem arises when the business doesn't care that it's stupid, but builds it for them anyway. Now you have a suboptimal solution that cost lots of money.

    Compare this with the amateurs. They are building it for themselves, so they are qualified on both the problem domain and the software construction. They aren't going to build something stupid because they are going to be the ones using it.

    Then there's the morale. The professionals are fully aware that what they are building is stupid. It's demoralising. They offer sensible solutions instead, but get knocked back with "it's not what the customer asked for". They begin to understand that their job isn't to build good software, it's to spend their time programming, and if the result is somewhat functional when they reach the deadline, that's just a bonus. It's not surprising that they don't really give a shit whether the code is up to scratch or not, because the whole exercise is pointless beyond collecting a paycheck.

    Again, compare with the amateurs. They get satisfaction not only from using the software they wrote (being both users and developers simultaneously), but they get the satisfaction from finding that others appreciate it too. They know they've solved a problem well, and they take pride in their work. People who take pride in their work generally put in more effort.

    If there's anything that businesses can learn from this, it's that they need to be able to say no to customers. To put off deadlines. To say "You know what? This is solving the wrong problem!" and go back to the drawing board with the customers to figure out a better approach. It's only when the professional programmers see that they are actually doing something productive that they'll feel motivated enough to take pride in their work, and feel like they are in an environment where they can contribute actual solutions instead of banging their head against a brick wall.

  • Naive article (Score:5, Interesting)

    by binaryDigit ( 557647 ) on Thursday August 04, 2005 @08:59AM (#13238828)
    His opinion, while interesting, is incredibly naive. It's great that there was recently a posting about the spread between "good" programmers and "average" programmers. Much of what the author talks about represents an incredibly small portion of the overall developer community. While there may be some people that would flourish being given freedom to work from home on a project that they found interesting, the fact is, those types of projects are fairly uncommon (the real challenge is to take the "mundane" project and make it interesting) as is the person who would actually benefit from this. Let's face it, the majority of developers would not see a similar leap in productivity. They might enjoy their lives more, but it certainly would not relate to higher productivity.

    The author mentions that M$ can't motivate its IE programming staff to come out with a "better" browser than FireFox. Well, discounting things like dealing with the codebase you have inherited, lets face it, M$ operates by putting their A Team resources where they perceive they are needed the most. Right now, they kick butt in the browser wars (even against "better" competition), so there isn't a perceived need to "have to come out with something significantly better". OTOH, the FireFox team does nothing but produce a browser (kinda), so of course they HAVE to be better. Would a new browser that was only "just as good", or even "not quite as good" been acceptable for the FF team, obviously not. So to assume that the quality of software coming from both sides has more to do with amateur developers vs non motivated professional developers is simply not looking at the bigger picture.
    • Do you know who the author is? He is not a pie-in-the-sky dreamer. He has produced some revolutionary products (the whole concept of Bayesian spam filtering is his). He can, and does deliver. I can agree that he deals with a small fraction of the developer community, but this is because he is an elite and he only needs to deal with the elite

      I don't think that the issues with IE relate to the fact that the programmers are second rate. I believe that the issues are that they are not supposed to fix thi

  • I think a large fraction of tech companies (at least here in the UK) run flexitime these days, generally something like 37.5 hours a week, you must be in the office between 11:00am and 3:00pm. And even large, traditional companies like Shell allow IT employees at least one day a week working from home.
  • Most businesses suppress the creativity of their employees. Part of this is through poor management practices, part of it is through poor strategic decisions that demoralize people, part of it is through decisions about the office environment, and part of it is legislation. I'm working on a "manifesto" about this: http://www.agileaxioms.com [agileaxioms.com] - I'd love people to take a look and tell me what you think. There's a comments link.
  • The article makes lots of assuptions that are false to begin with. Not all open source projects are good quality. Not all the good ones get famous to atract lots of developers and grow. Actually Sourceforge is more of a source cemetery.

    When people are paid for units of work rather than hours they will try to do anything to get themselves more productive. And number one step is lowering the quality as much as they can. I have seen this happen in real life.

    The one thing that makes FOSS better is in my opini

  • How Business benefits from Open Source. (Score:3, Informative)

    by mikegi ( 187558 ) <.grid. .at. .iki.fi.> on Thursday August 04, 2005 @09:08AM (#13238866) Homepage
    At Debconf 5 there was a good talk by Bdale Garbee [gag.com] about how Hewlett Packard [hp.com] benefits from Open Source.

    Slides [gag.com] and Video [debian.net].

  • Gee (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Synli ( 781075 )
    by triangulating from open source and blogging. As you've probably noticed, they have a lot in common This is the most irritating comment I've read in a long time. Blogging has nothing in common with open source, except for it is one of the things that are now considered cool even by mainstream media. Apart from being currently "in", they have nothing in common.
    • Blogging has nothing in common with open source....

      Isn't that point that both are examples of amateurs successfully providing product that traditionally comes only from professional organizations? That seems like a valid point to me.

  • I've worked an a few open source projects. The common denominator among those projects is that people WANT to work on them. It's fun, it's usually non-committal, there are no "drop dead" timelines, etc. >>why the home is a better work environment than >>the office >>and how bottom up ideas are better than top down This just isn't how the "real world" works. Over half the people in the US aren't particularly happy to go to work every day. Projects ARE handed down and down "top down" b

  • Paul Graham: Great Hacker, Crappy Economist (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Phemur ( 448472 ) on Thursday August 04, 2005 @09:28AM (#13238978)
    While Paul Graham may have incredible hacking skills, his writings about business leave much to be desired.

    In his latest essay, he tries to explain why a Professional will never be as productive as an Amateur because Professionals don't do what they like. Excuse me? So you're saying amateur athletes players are better than people in the NBA/NHL/MLB/NFL because they'll play for free? That's absolutely ridiculous. Professional athletes are more motivated than anyone else. What about people who actually applied for jobs doing work they loved, like me. Not only do I have a job I love, I get paid to do it.

    I'm certain there are people who hate their jobs, and who are very unproductive. But has Paul ever considered the fact that maybe they were unmotivated to begin with, and that the reason they took that job was because they were too unmotivated to get anything else?

    A previous posted stated that motivation is what drives productivity. I couldn't agree more. Money has absolutely nothing to do with productivity, it's all about motivation.

    Phemur

    • Professional atheletes and actors are two special cases. The only people who can rise to their level, love doing what it is they do. When a star stops loving the job, watch them fall. On the other hand, many of these people will work for free, (or scale wages) if the job is exactly what they want to be doing right now.

      Another observation is that at that level, the coaches and directors hire other people to do all the mundane stuff that the atheletes and actors don't want to do, that isn't related to the
    • I think he is referring not to the fact that the professional developers are not motivated in and of themselves. He is referring more to the environment that professional developers are forced to work in.

      E.g. If I stare at the ceiling in my cube for an hour thinking about a problem, my micromanager will roll around and ask me why I am not "working". You see in most professional development environments managers equate typing code with working.
  • ...everyone knows that if the idea didn't come from a guy in marketing that has no idea what he's talking about, it has absolutely no value to customers.

    Shesh...bottom up ideas...ya...right...

  • If you work in a vaccum, working from home is great, but when you are trying to produce a coherent product, and market it with one message, you need to be in an office.

    I do a lot of work from home and find that I goof off more than when I used to work in an office. I may work when want and get things done on time, buttoo frequently, I just procrstinate until I can't put things off any more. I think that, socially speaking, being an office is a good thing.

    But it isn't jus the social aspect of being in an o

  • Murphy's Law and professional coders (Score:3, Interesting)

    by suitepotato ( 863945 ) on Thursday August 04, 2005 @10:18AM (#13239279)
    If there's anything business tends to learn, for a combination of reasons which do include constant onslaught from those who are reflexively anti-business (attack and your enemy defends, it is easier to influence friends than defeat enemies), it is to do things as cheaply as possible.

    Coders have as much right as anyone else to be paid for their work. Oh, but here comes Free Open Source Software. Legions of geeks willing to write all sorts of code you find useful and you can use it in your business. They want you to. Who needs to pay coders' relatively large salaries now? Now you have a cudgel in the fight against giving the coders the pay they want and feel they deserve. Why pay $60K/year to someone writing in-house apps when you can pay some geek who couldn't maintain a job at Dairy Queen but who has really good Linux skills half that?

    THAT is what business learns from FOSS. And all OSS is FOSS in the minds of the majority of the OSS using and writing world. It certainly is in business. A way just needs to be found to insure that is is FOSS.

    The socialistic and chintzy anti-corporate "free, free, free" brigades and the corporate "closed source if we can help it, open source if we pay nothing" people need to call a truce and establish a way that coding can be open to future learning from it without denying fair IP to anyone or making it hard to earn money from your labors or for those who are not in OSS. Corporations will always make money. If it is not handled right, then they will be the only ones making money and those doing the programming will make little to none. All because of blind fanaticism, inability to see the forest for the trees, and unwillingness to do what is needed in the way of compromise and different approaches to the conflict.

    Not for nothing my day job isn't programming or supporting same anymore.

  • "the home is a better work environment" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Thursday August 04, 2005 @10:50AM (#13239492)
    "the home is a better work environment than the office"

    The author must not have a wife or kids.

  • Perhaps the best part of Graham's missive is this: If you could measure how much work people did, many companies wouldn't need any fixed workday. You could just say: this is what you have to do. Do it whenever you like, wherever you like. If your work requires you to talk to other people in the company, then you may need to be here a certain amount. Otherwise we don't care.

    A lot of people seem to be getting hung up on the amateur vs. professional distinction, but the message I pull from the article is th

  • Open Source and blooging have a lot in common?

    Well, they have a few things in common. But every idiot and his pet rat seem to be blogging, and the vast, *vast* majority of it isn't worth reading, except maybe by friends and some family.

    The quality of the average open source project is far better than the average blog, and far more useful to many people.

    You might as well claim the Spac Shuttle and the personal bicycle have a lot in common because they both help people go places.
    • Have you been to sourceforge lately? How many "projects" there actually do anything? When I search sourceforge for a task-specific project, I have to sift through many do-nothing projects to find one or two that might work.
  • Paul Graham has written a fantastic article...

    This article is only "fantastic" if you are already a "true believer" in what he's already saying. At that point, you are just looking for others to help you validate your own beliefs.

    His second paragraph, for example:

    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.

    Is completely religious. What Google, Yah

  • Home is not a better environment!!! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Locke2005 ( 849178 ) on Thursday August 04, 2005 @12:50PM (#13241291)
    I have a 4-year old. Trust me, I get far, far fewer interruptions when working at the office than when working at home!

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