Unusual Open Source 262
Dumitru Erhan writes "The Economist has a special report on open-source. It analyzes the way open-source projects succeed and finds that a rigid, business-like organizational structure is of vital importance to the quality of the final product. It cites Firefox, MySQL and (more recently) Wikipedia as examples of projects that do not simply allow anarchy to rein in, but which have 'real checks and balances, and real leadership taking place'. There is also a discussion of open-source methods being applied to non-software projects." From the article: "Constant self-policing is required to ensure its quality. This lesson was brought home to Wikipedia last December, after a former American newspaper editor lambasted it for an entry about himself that had been written by a prankster. His denunciations spoke for many, who question how something built by the wisdom of crowds can become anything other than mob rule."
Sounds like... (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't that how people get elected?
Oh, I see what he means now.
Re:Sounds like... (Score:4, Interesting)
It actually makes no sense given that there's no single entity responding to the mob. They act as individuals on individual pages.
Mob rule might be the case if they're deciding on a single issue. But if you can't get a mob to even decide what issue they're deciding upon, then it's just a whole lot of people doing things.
Re:Sounds like... (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, but charismatic leaders can guide mobs and once they have enough of them in line, they can direct the mob against those who don't fall into step or question things. I believe Adolf Hitler
[!Error 53 - Godwin Invoked - Thread terminated]
Re:Sounds like... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sounds like... (Score:2)
Since one of their major goals is objectivity, no wonder. Sounds like you've been trying to fit the square peg into the round hole.
Prove it. (Score:3, Funny)
How do we know it can only be explained in terms of human experience? Please state some facts to back up your assumption.
Re:Sounds like... (Score:4, Funny)
No.
The way people in the american political system get elected, is the parties pick candidates to be picked apart by vultures, then one rigs the election system so they win in pivotal states with large numbers of "electors" who then are supposed to vote for so and so from their districts. In backwards countries, where vile dictators for life, parties labeled as terrorists, political strongmen and their machines all practice it works pretty much the same, but only american leaders are allowed to be critical of how the other countries process works.
Mob rule would mean people actually pick their candidates themselves and throw all their votes behind them and the one who actually gets the most votes wins.
Clearly we can't have that, so strong organizations, such as political parties are necessary to ensure we get what we deserve.
i believe in education -- i'll teach you all a lesson
Re:Sounds like... (Score:3, Interesting)
My big gripe with Wikipedia is that it just takes it for granted that everybody wants to work together to create an optimal result. I'm not just talking about pranksters and vandals. I'm talking about people who aren't really interested in collaboration — they have a cert
Re:Sounds like... (Score:2)
Re:Sounds like... (Score:2)
Don't like Wikipedia, build your own, attempt to control it and the copyright fascists will be all over you, each demanding that their accredited entry remains and takes precedence over everybody else's, civil suits to define whose name goes with what bit of writing and who is right and who is wrong.
As far as I know, you can take all of Wikipedia
Re:Sounds like... (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes.
Re:Sounds like... (Score:2, Insightful)
Sounds like... The "invisible hand" (Score:2)
Really, I have come to the opinion that most people are afraid of true freedom, but would rather look for direction from centralized control such as religion, corporations, a religous belief in certain Economic dogma (the free market, the inevibility of communism, capitalism etc.) or the government.
The article also seems to equate commercial su
Re:Sounds like... (Score:5, Interesting)
Follow up (Score:2)
Re:Follow up (Score:5, Insightful)
I've shown people incredible stuff on my (Linux) PC, but often when they find out it doesn't run on Windows they continue to pretend it doesn't exist.
Re:Follow up (Score:2)
An arbitrary organization can make up arbitrary rules and call them 'standards'.
A huge number of people can agree upon something, without the arbitrary organization giving it creedence, and it is called a 'de-facto standard'.
Different people are impressed by different types of standards. Not surprisingly, most people adhere to the de-facto standards (which is pretty much the definition) and don't realize it. They don't care- they only want stuff to work.
'St
The Economist... only 20 years behind the times (Score:5, Insightful)
You see, one thing economists (and many, many others) get wrong time and time again, is self organisation... They just don't get it for some reason. The "bazaar" encourages, promotes lots of projects, lots of errors, lots of iterations, lots of dead projects and we get emergent behaviour out of that environment. These are projects which are strong, robust and evolutionary in that they will fill all of the niches in which they are needed. These projects are
Re:The Economist... only 20 years behind the times (Score:5, Insightful)
And the amazing thing is that, if you say businesses should be regulated, they're very likely to yell, "NO! The market must be FREE! The market has WISDOM!" Then they go back to saying open source is socialism...
Cognitive dissonance ain't just for psychologists and Republicans anymore.
Re:The Economist... only 20 years behind the times (Score:2)
"Please regulate the market (ie. give us tax money) so we can continue to support the economy (and make bucketloads of money) and give jobs to natives (which we will offshore later)."
Yes, but also following best practices (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The Economist... only 20 years behind the times (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually I think economists have too much faith in self organisation, particularly by markets. For example by insisting that markets can solve environmental problems without intervention.
Re:The Economist... only 20 years behind the times (Score:2)
Some economists (and most politicians, businessmen, and lobbyists) like to define "market" in such a way that only their favored conditions qualify as a market, but if you take a fairly bland definition like Wikipedia's (A market is a soc
working markets require an educated public (Score:2)
I bet most people have no idea how their health is effected by industrialized runoff created by the products they use every day. The 3M plant here is one of the worst environmental offenders - and yet I bet asthma suffers don't think twice about buying that roll of tape...
Re:The Economist... only 20 years behind the times (Score:2)
In fact, these same economists make the same 'push' vs 'pull' comparison between free markets and planned economies - Socialist, Communist or just countries with large state sectors. What little business economics I did do also suggests that most economists thi
Re:The Economist... only 20 years behind the times (Score:2)
I think you're very right about the Economist (and economists) not understanding self-organisation - the article has a kind of circularity, in that I think part of the definition of 'success' favours a strongly branded project that one that has forked to fill many niches (Linux) or might be very widely used but little known outside techies (Tomcat).
Leadership (Score:5, Insightful)
Open source is successful because of the large number of people who have an interst in its success. Centralizing leadership might be helpful in some way, but I don't see it as the most important thing.
Re:Leadership (Score:3, Insightful)
Well personally I would say having a large number of people with invested interest in a project's success leads to good leadership and visa versa, the two aren't exclusive.
Somewhere there is always money, just look at the recent articles about Mozilla making a mint off Firefox, Redhat's contribution to Linux,
Re:Leadership (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Leadership (Score:4, Interesting)
In Wikipedia the most active editor wins. Whether they're right or wrong.
I've heard a couple of horror stories of the admins at wikipedia forcing agendas too (things like refusing very minor edits because they mention things they disagree with, and even blocking page names for things that they disagree with)*
It's an interesting variation on the blog, but I wouldn't call it 'successful' in any way. Slashdot fanboys like it, that's all.
* And the person who told me this is trustworthy, and definately an expert in their field having 20+ years experience. The eventually managed to get some edits in but only after appealing to other admins who removed the page blocks - 6 months later.
Re:Leadership (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Leadership (Score:3)
I would posit that this theoretical programmer hasn't spent a lot of time on real-life projects.... There is no perfect code. Never. Just undiscovered requirements.
Re:Leadership (Score:2, Interesting)
Add moderation(users vote on article -1 flamebait),article voting(for best version),click stats(view per day,week,month,country,etc).
Soem other wikis will have these features and rule the wikisphere.
Wikipedia is in current form is flawed and the policies aren't attractive in any sense.
I stopped posting after they required registration for new articles,
deleted what i wrote in other articles(with a snobby excuse).
I improve wiki pages ocassion
Check out Groklaw (Score:5, Informative)
The reporter interviewed her. She has his questions and her answers. He obviouly ignored what she told him and printed a story full of factual innacuracies.
This is bad, bad reporting. Do I still trust the Economist? Not much.
Re:Check out Groklaw (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps I'm biased against Groklaw. Sometimes I can't take the world-weary, sighing, 'know all the answers', 'the rest of the world is idiotic' tone of the postings there. I'm sure I'll be punished accordingly by groklaw fans with mod points, but what use is good Karma if you can't cash it in once in a while?
PJ overreacts - again (Score:3, Interesting)
PJ and her followers do not take even mild criticism of open source well at all.
Re:PJ overreacts - again (Score:2)
That said, they are a terrific resource. Just avoid the comments sections.
Re:PJ overreacts - again (Score:2, Insightful)
a few "groupthinks" linked into one.
I noticed the longer i stay in a forum,the less i object to its "normality and crowd opinion".
Strong groupthink is what is dangerous,not a shared attitude or ideology strain that got p
Summary gets anarchism wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
As an anarchist geek, let me point out that this is a wrong use of the word "anarchy." Anarchism is a political philosophy that is FOR organization. Many people have described Wikipedia as an example of "anarchism in action" and they aren't misusing the word instead of using "chaos." The free software/open source (FOSS) movement is another example of anarchism in action and includes many actual anarchists working on various projects.
Find out more about anarchism at http://www.infoshop.org/ [infoshop.org] (where half of the visitors are using Firefox and other open source browsers)
Re:Summary gets anarchism wrong (Score:4, Informative)
"Anarchism as a political philosophy, is the belief that rulers, governments, and hierarchal social relationships are unnecessary and should be abolished, although there are differing interpretations of what this means."
Sounds like another one of those -isms that people have adopted and modified from its true original meaning to make themselves feel different, like Satanism. Anarchy means chaos and lack of organization. Oxford says "a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority."
"ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: via medieval Latin from Greek anarkhia, from anarkhos, from an- 'without' + arkhos 'chief, ruler.'"
Re:Summary gets anarchism wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, your Oxford dictionary is the definition that has been modified from its true original meaning.
Sorry, but you don't seem to know what you're talking about.
Kropotkin was born in 1842, Bakunin in 1814, and Proudhon in 1809, right? Well, the OED provides citations for "anarchy" in the sense of "lawlessness" dating back to 1539, and for "anarchy" in the sense of "moral or intellectual disorder" dating back to 1656.
If we assume that words have such a thing as a "true original meaning", then I would be inclined to say that the way the word was used in 1539 (and is still most commonly used today) is more likely to be the "true original meaning" than the way the word was used by a handful of philosphers in the 1850s. Unless you're about to propose that they invented the time machine as well?
Re:Summary gets anarchism wrong (Score:2)
"Anarchy" is not a word from 16th century. In fact, it was first used by Sophocles' character Antigone.
In this context, it was used as an act of disobedience against an injust government, which prohibited the burial of her brother.
In this sense, it is not representative of chaos and disorder, but a morality and consciousness outside of worldly laws.
Much like anarchism, the political theory. An-archos = without rule.
Re:Summary gets anarchism wrong (Score:2)
Re:Summary gets anarchism wrong (Score:2, Interesting)
Someone seriously needs to fix that site's FAQ. I honestly tried to figure out what "anarchism" means but instead left with a splitting headache.
If I were trying to make a FAQ as unreadable as possible, here are some techniques I would use:
Re:Summary gets anarchism wrong (Score:2)
God I hate English (Score:2)
Re:Summary gets anarchism wrong (Score:2)
Re:Summary gets anarchism wrong (Score:2)
Re:Summary gets anarchism wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets see what wiktionary has to say (Score:2)
Re:Summary gets anarchism wrong (Score:2, Funny)
It's a plot by the chinese communist party to make americans stupid.
Re:Summary gets anarchism wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
What "responsibility"? What "misuse"? A word cannot be "often misused" - if it's often used a certain way, then that is how it is used, and it is the fact of the usage that legitimises its inclusion in dictionaries, not the other way round!
As the poet wrote:
Re:Summary gets anarchism wrong (Score:2)
Certain fields also have their own specialized technical terminology. Anarchism is a specialized term used by historians, political scientists, etc. They need the
Shock! (Score:2)
Of course you have to stick to a rigid business-like organizational structure.
Re:Shock! (Score:2)
Then you totally disregard ESR's premise in "The Cathedral And The Bazaar."
Yet Again, the BSDs get Snubbed (Score:4, Interesting)
Yet again, the PR-excellence of the Linux crowd wins. Even though, for instance, Yahoo!, a company that hosts a huge number of sites (and stores), uses FreeBSD.
That's OK with me -- it is a secret weapon.
Re:Yet Again, the BSDs get Snubbed (Score:2)
Sure, I love bsd as much as the next guy, but seriously - the bsds have more rigid professionalism? more emphasis on correctness over features? Given the amount of improvement in the linux kernel over the past 10 years, compared to that of the bsds, that seems a curious statement.
BTW I'll see your yahoo, and raise you a google and an amazon.com.
Re:Yet Again, the BSDs get Snubbed (Score:3, Insightful)
OpenBSD definitely shows an emphasis on correctness over features.
FreeBSD and NetBSD have different goals.
That said, all three of them are wonderful projects. It's the licensing, not the professionalism or code quality or any other technical concern, that keeps them from being competitive with linux for mindshare.
Re:Yet Again, the BSDs get Snubbed (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess by improvement in the Linux kernel, you mean broken 2.6 development or bleeding edge hacks that break things. Yes, the BSDs have a much more professional approach. They actually try to retain stability instead of hacking in the latest gee-whiz device driver or VM scheme that breaks things.
Re:Yet Again, the BSDs get Snubbed (Score:2)
I've not really had any problems on CentOS 4 or SuSE 9.2 thru 10. In contrast, I think they've worked much better than the 2.4 based stuff I've used in the past.
hacking in the latest gee-whiz device driver
Why is having support for more hardware a bad thing? I can't see how having more devices that are atleast partially supported can hurt.
VM scheme that breaks thing
I assume you're talking about Xen here? If so, what has it broken? I've not heard of people having any h
Re:Yet Again, the BSDs get Snubbed (Score:2)
OK, I love FreeBSD. In fact, I'm typing this on a FreeBSD 6-STABLE machine. Having said that, what crack are you on? FreeBSD tends to be hyper-stable, in that if you build a machine from good sources, it'll be rock-solid for ages. However, the "new" ATA system killed IDE support on a motherboard I'd been using for Linux and
Re:Yet Again, the BSDs get Snubbed (Score:4, Interesting)
GPL wins. A professor may not bother that people close his code, but companies do, so lots of developers never see the BSD kernels, nor work with it. And the word doesn't spread, so people don't consider it.
Re:Yet Again, the BSDs get Snubbed (Score:2)
There is nothing to stop you from modifying BSD code and releasing the lot under the GPL.
Re:Yet Again, the BSDs get Snubbed (Score:2)
Re:Yet Again, the BSDs get Snubbed (Score:2)
Re:Yet Again, the BSDs get Snubbed (Score:3, Insightful)
There are a couple of things that makes Linux more popular. One is timing, as Linux arrived at a crucial moment (the advent of the cheap 32bit CPU) while BSD was stuck in court with a monopolist. More importantly, Linux is just a piece of the whole. Hackers love to put stuff to
Re:Yet Again, the BSDs get Snubbed (Score:2)
Competition. Hurd is making significant progress, considering it only has a few developers. And it is, in a way, competing with Linux for mindshare, if nothing else. But the Hurd will take off once they get it stable, because its licensed under the GPL, meaning all Linux drivers will be legal to port.
Re:Yet Again, the BSDs get Snubbed (Score:2)
As a sister poster already pointed out, the BSD license is truly Free in that it gives anyone the right to piss in your face and make a $million off your code. Business's don't want that, they want to get a guaranteed return on anything they contribute. It's all about give a little and take a lot.
Re:Yet Again, the BSDs get Snubbed (Score:2)
Also, the BSD devil is not the most customer friendly mascott. That may have something to do with this..
Re:Yet Again, the BSDs get Snubbed (Score:2)
Look at who was using the systems in 1993. The original people who choose Linux wanted a Solaris desktop but couldn't afford it. The people who started the BSD wanted a Solaris server but couldn't afford it. I'm only half joking here.
Linus came from the Minix community, they wanted to play with Unix not do work with it. Then they picked up the desktop guys (VA community). The Coherent community joined very quickly. Desktop
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Truism (Score:4, Insightful)
So, if you define sucess as having a big reachable community, the sucessfull projects will have someone able to tell you the name of every developer. If you define sucess as being used by corporations, the sucessfull projects look like corporation projects.
Now, we could get the first page with some more truisms, or we could forget about generalising this idea of "sucess" to an area where there is simply no metric to be used.
What never made sense to me (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What never made sense to me (Score:2)
Wikipedia is not open source (Score:3)
Liking Wikipedia to Linux is a huge error. The quality issue is extremely relevant.
Re:Wikipedia is not open source (Score:2)
Re:Wikipedia is not open source (Score:2, Insightful)
Many eyes help (Score:4, Insightful)
It's obvious that an entry created and commented on by many disinterested people is less biased than an entry created and commented on by few. Traditional encylopedias fall in the latter category, Wikipedia falls in the former. But people are not always disinterested, and that's where the problems lie. So the real problem is: are all the participants disinterested? With traditional encylopedias, the chances are that most writers are semi-disinterested observers, as they are ordered to write about subjects, they don't select them themselves. With Wikipedia, people self-select themselves, which means they cannot be disinterested, by definition. And that's the reason that some kind of community control is required for projects like this.
Re:Many eyes help (Score:2)
Re:Many eyes help (Score:2)
No, disinterested is exactly what I meant. Encyclopedia writers are supposed to be objective, i.e., disinterested w.r.t. the subject at hand. Like judges are supposed to be disinterested w.r.t. the outcome of the cases they handle --
Re:Many eyes help (Score:2)
In other news... (Score:2)
Re:In other news... (Score:2)
Business types may
May be a Good Thing (Score:4, Insightful)
'real checks and balances, and real leadership taking place'
"Constant self-policing is required to ensure its quality.
Any task envisioning an end product could be said to require the characteristics mentioned above. What may be of more importance is that the venerable 'Economist'(although I believe its always been seen as left leaning) is making an effort to wrap its mind around Open Source and in doing so allowing its readers to follow suit.
Over the last year plus I've noticed more articles that tend to view Open Source projects as akin to 'hardnosed' business methods. I think they represent the establishment coming to a positive consensus about Open Source methods and projects.
I noticed a turn in the way the general business community reported and interacted with Open Source from about the time IBM ran the ads picturing Linux as a small, blonde haired, blue eyed wonderkid.
The old boy network isn't about to let Open Source join the club but they're certainly ready to let it in the service entrance.
Re:May be a Good Thing (Score:3, Funny)
That makes a certain amount of sense. Calling Open Source formal, heirarchical, and controlled could be a business-world way of establishing friendly relations by handing out generic compliments, like telling your new co-worker, "That's a nice shirt," or, "You have s
only businesses make for success? (Score:2, Insightful)
Then later, "With software, for instance, the code is written chiefly not by volunteers, but by employees sponsored for their efforts by companies that think they will in some way benefit from the project."
Jesus. There must be a host of FOSS projects which were highly successful, but never involved with a company or corporate sponsorship.
Does the Linux kernel itself fall under that categ
How is this news? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ask Slashdot: (Score:4, Interesting)
This is the crowd that would know.
Or in the alternative, is "strong central leadership" so inherent to all human endeavors that the thesis is a meaningless tautology?
Re: Successful GPL Projects (Score:2)
I'm sticking to GPL projects because I don't know about other ones as well. This is not meant to diss the BSD crowd.
Anarchy (Score:5, Interesting)
Open source projects are the model of anarchist principles - people getting together, contributing when they want to, and promoting the common good. Even Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] knows that.
Ironically, Wikipedia does confuse the definition (Score:2)
comparative improvement (Score:3)
Open Graphics Project (Score:2)
A few inaccuracies... (Score:4, Informative)
This is giving way too much credit to SCO's claims. I don't think it was ever proved that a single line owned by SCO was found in Linux. As I recall they were basing their claims on free lines of BSD which were added to both SCO and Linux.
And after the furore over the biographical entry last year, Wikipedia changed its rules so that only registered users can edit existing entries
This is simply wrong. Anonymous users can and always have been able to edit existing articles.
Well, this article is still pretty decent but I expect better from The Economist.
all organizations... (Score:2, Insightful)
About the only thing that isn't, is a project that is totally conceived, implemented and deployed by a single
Challenging the Managerialist View (Score:4, Interesting)
I have a paper that challenges these notions being published in the upcoming (Summer 2006) edition of Organization Development Journal called, "THE PENGUINIST DISCOURSE: A critical application of open source software project management
to organization development"
While I can't make the paper available online just yet, the abstract reads as follows: For those with in-house OD folks, you may want to alert them to the next edition of the journal. (I also do strategy and OD facilitation and interventions on a contract basis; you can track me down via my profile.)
That's not what I heard ... (Score:2)
"... open-source software--products that are often built by volunteers and cost nothing to use."
Apparently they haven't read the many Microsoft funded TCO analysis papers
Economists are amazed by old trend - again (Score:3)
Once again we have a group of people amazed by the concept of giving away knowlege for nothing without noticing that we got to where we are today by exactly that process. We need better science education in our schools and universities - if only to stop some bottom rung business graduate who has achieved his position via connected relatives from calling us commies for using firefox.
Edison for many good reasons is held up as the great example of technological capitalism, and the light bulb as his greatest acheivement. Consider that many of his contemporaries even in remote parts of the world also produced working light bulbs within weeks of the time and totally independant of his efforts - he built his great acheivement on the shared knowlege produced by others and circulated worldwide.
To sum up, open source is an old idea and Bill's idea of charging money for hobby software is a new one.
Re:Spot On - FUD ... Japanese lack creativity... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Spot On-Brother, can you spare some innovation? (Score:2)