Virtual Decentralized Networks: Linux's Organization

barries writes: "Here is an interesting take on the Linux Project which tries to put it in a historical perspective and explain why traditional structures and theory don't fully apply to it. It overlooks a few things but gets most of the basics right." You might want to skip ahead a bit in the paper to get to the Linux-specific sections.

Pseudoscientists of the world unite

[Ars-Fartsica]

Linux is popular because it is free, useful, and became useful at the right time.

This pseudoscience about organizational dynamics is what is referred to as curve fitting - using your results to frame your hypothesis.

"Loosely decentralized virtual organizations" could just as soon describe a bowling team. Its gibberish folks.

Re:Pseudoscientists of the world unite

[Chardish]

Was there a single word in here that wasn't gibberish? Most of it seemed pretty nonsensical to me.

There were several sentences explaining, basically, why their research is inaccurate.

-Evan

Appendix I is interesting

[Christopher Whitt]

It's entitled Microsoft: The Cathedral [firstmonday.org].

Some interesting snippets:

On MS Culture and Management

MS's culture is anti-bureaucratic and developers are been given large amounts of freedom

MS is a company where titles often don't mean as much as credibility, and thus, being blunt is a way to establish dominance. The company is rife with pecking-order gamesmanship, such as not answering e-mail or chronically arriving late to meetings" and in all, politics reign (at software development) in MS. [...] Survival of the fittest is systemic -internecine backstabbing did not evaporate in the presence of great intelligence and wealth, it became more brutal". Insiders argue that Gates himself is responsible for this culture of conflict in two ways: by being arrogant ("Gates is famous for ridiculing someone's idea just to see how he or she defends a position") and by employing the brightest people and inducing them to grow arrogant and assertive

On learning:
Fresh employees do not go through a formal training programme but they learn on the job. [...] MS takes advantage of the knowledge it has accumulated by exploiting emerging mass markets and establishing its products as standards. But at an organisational level, learning is restricted. "Communication frequently suffers as a result of the inner corporate politics and even privileged employees have trouble getting information from inside Microsoft, a reflection of the long-standing schism between the company's marketing staff and its legion of programmers". MS even blocks widespread sharing (of their own source code) within the company (Valloppillil, 1998; Nadeau, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c).

Learning from customers is also limited since there is not effective two-way communication between developers and customers. Lots of people who have used MS' 'help/support services' found it problematic and of limited help.

And on innovation:

Analysts claim that MS finds it difficult to balance being technology-driven with being consumer-driven and this results to great difficulty to move from incremental innovation to truly radical innovation or invention.

After all, MS's competitive strategy is to design products for mass markets and then improve them incrementally by enhancing existing features or adding new ones. Perhaps it this 'incremental evolution' product approach that impedes radical innovation: "The company has a very dramatic focus on its profitable business. I'm not saying that's bad. But it does preclude you from doing any dramatic thinking, doing any dramatic innovation" ... "to the extent that several employees manipulate their inferiors to be given a chance to create something really novel".

There's also a neat diagram [firstmonday.org]of MS's corporate partnerships.

Christopher

(Just karma-whoring today - math assignment prevents me from engaging brain).

Re:If I hadn't already posted, I'd mod this funny!

[damiam]

But how many of those end in -rbation?

Re:Appendix I is interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on, you've just described every tech company I've ever worked for.

Do people honestly think big egos are limited to MS?

Go to any company where a portion of the employees became very wealthy from stock options and you can watch the snobbery ensue.

Re:Appendix I is interesting

[Hertog]

In the diagram mentioned above, there is a direct link between MSFT and RedHat,
Does that mean M$ owns part of RH (since they are public) or does it mean that RedHat and MS are economically bound because they share a market?

Re:Appendix I is interesting

[susano_otter]

Funny, but the diagram doesn't appear to show Conxion [conxion.net], which is the hosting company that has "virtually all" of Microsoft's download servers. . .

Lame lame lame...

[webword]

2001-11-02 05:34:52 The Virtual Networked Organisation (articles,news) (rejected)

Good (but stange) to see a business admin view

[Mandelbrute]

It's good to see a business administration view of this, but a little odd. All of the substance is in large numbers of pretty pictures (targeting the market I suppose). This is a new way of doing things to the writer's audience, but to a large chunk of the world it is nothing new.

Q: What does an unemployed person with a degree in business say?
A:Hey buddy, can you paradigm?

Where have we heard this before?

[cperciva]

I don't know about everyone else here, but personally after 2000 I've been a bit skeptical of claims that something "is breaking new ground and traditional structures and theory don't fully apply to it."

Re:Where have we heard this before?

[robbyjo]

but personally after 2000...

Well, this paper talks about observations waay back in the 40s. And... don't forget that Linux is created in the 90-s. :-)

RE: Figure 9.

[fshalor]

This makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
I was a bit supprised at the smallish arrows in figure 9, (these led back to the trusted lieutenents and Linus.)

Considering the shere volumes of emails these guys get...

Planning scopes as obstacles

[Big Jojo]

Confessing up front that I've only read the parts relating to free/open source and Linux, and skimmed the rest of that HUGE opus ...

At some level the observations here are completely predictable. It's old hat to anyone who's tried to get something large under way; the buzzwords aren't news. The interesting bits are when the author talks about how the Linux model might work in other industries.

What I've found interesting about the Linux community is best observed as a contrast between how Linux works, and how most other software projects I've been on have worked. Briefly, it's the central planning thing. Microsoft is just a big and current example, not the only one.

Traditional OS software orgs insist on being able to control lots and lots of things, just so that they can present plans justifying themselves to folk who finance their work. And many of those financers are actually trying to sell hardware; look at Sun, DEC, HP, IBM, or most folk now working in OS software without Linux. OS decisions that don't immediately sell hardware tend to get under-rewarded, compared to Linux. And because of management overheads, there is no way to incorporate very much work that's not a current "top" priority since such efforts detract from the process of collecting fat bonuses (issued for short term goals far more than long term ones).

A lot of the "parallelism" of Linux is just the fact that developers have finally started to be able to escape from such straitjackets, and don't need to tie themselves so exclusively to short sighted bottom line issues. It's those short planning horizons that have hobbled most software organizations without the benefit of a monopoly over most of a large industry.

Re:Planning scopes as obstacles

[duffbeer703]

What sorts of features have been ignored in commerical operating systems?

Broken volume managers?
Broken/Inconsistent VM's
Massive bloat?
Testing?
The need for every patch to be 80 lines or less? (Unless it involves re-writing something for the 10th time)
Release early and release often, to the tune of two or more 'production' kernel 'releases' a week?

Fundamental flaw of the paper

[vlad_petric]

There is nothing in this paper to convince me that such a model would work for a capitalist enterprise. The comparison between the Linux Project and Microsoft is absurd, as the first is a volunteer-based non profit project, while the second is a company. Models that work for a class of projects don't necessarily work for others.

Moreover, statements like:

If the automobile industry started taking on an open source development model with sharing across companies and countries, the cost and prices would eventually drop, innovation and development would speed up and exceptional features would be shared across many makers and models. The auto industry could finally come up with the safe, clean energy car.


are simply hallucinogenic.

Remember, the difference between communism and capitalism is that sharing is mandatory in the first and optional in the second.

The Raven.

Re:Fundamental flaw of the paper

[XBL]

Not to mention the fact that it's kinda hard to have people build cars collaborating over the Internet. It is too much a physical process. Software is not.

Open-source software development models are becoming rather efficient with better tools that have been in long-time development. I doubt there are auto engineering apps that allow easy Internet collaboration on development.

I could have wrote a better paper than this, no doubts.

Re:Fundamental flaw of the paper

[Anonymous Coward]

I could have wrote a better paper than this, no doubts.

And with much gooder grammar too!!

Re:Fundamental flaw of the paper

[psamuels]

I doubt there are auto engineering apps that allow easy Internet collaboration on development.

Not so. Ask IBM's consulting arm about PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) sometime. In certain sectors, including automotive, it seems to be one of this year's buzzwords. PLM is hard to pin down, like any good buzzword, but it seems to enable lots of nifty B2B type stuff.

Whether or not deploying SmarTeam, WebSphere, etc so you can have shared whiteboards, parts lists, design specs, CAD databases, etc. actually helps engineers collaborate over distance remains, IMHO, to be proven.

Re:Fundamental flaw of the paper

[DGolden]

Actually, car companies do cooperate. But they cooperate to make the cheapest, shoddiest product the market will bear, and to price-fix. It's not in their interests to make a clean, energy efficient car.

Don't forget, there isn't a single large-scale example of a pure communist or pure capitalist society. Americans tend to confuse communism with the soviet dictatorships - at no point in time was the USSR a truly communist society, just as America is by no means a purely capitalist society. Anyway, sharing is generally a good thing, and by no means mandatory in most small-scale communes - just don't expect people to share with you if you don't share in return, and expect them to pressure you to leave. I think that's fair enough, really.

Re:Fundamental flaw of the paper

[DGolden]

Er. no. They conspire to make money. They don't really care whether we're down or up, beyond the fact that people who are simultaneously "up" and ill-informed tend to buy more cars.

Background: I am a mechanical engineer. I have encountered, and have even had lectures and exams on, things like planned obsolescence (which is actually a good and necessary thing in many ways for both the producer and consumer (unplanned obsolescence is often much worse), but in today's society mostly the period's so short it's much better for the producer. Witness cars essentially wearing out after 5 years), the formation of price-fixing cartels, and why they're desirable for producers, and on the "cooperation" between the oil and automotive industry that has kept much better technologies on the fringe for years. Technologies, in fact, that undergraduate mechanical engineers happily study, thinking they'll make the world better - of course then they get a bit older and discover that for the most part, those technologies are unlikely to see mass production for petty reasons.

I'm tired now, but here's [kuro5hin.org] a rant in roughly the same area that I wrote earlier.

Re:Fundamental flaw of the paper

[The Smith]

Of course the open-source model wouldn't work for cars. When building a car you have to fit everything into a rigidly defined shell which limits the size, shape and mass of all components. In other words, cars aren't modular enough to benefit from the parallelism which is open-source's greatest advantage.

But your implication that many open-source people are communists isn't only unjustified, it's absolutely FALSE. That is the kind of insidious tactic I'd expect from Microsoft's PR people; it is not welcome here.

GNU/Linux

[XBL]

To quote:

"In fact, the Linux OS is licensed under the GNU GPL and uses most of the GNU programs. That is why it is often referred as GNU/Linux."

Ummm, I don't know anyone who calls it that, and I hear RMS is on of the few who actually does.

Things like this can really distract a reader, ya know?

Re:GNU/Linux

[mabinogi]

Things like this can really distract a reader, ya know?

I don't know why, 'cause it IS actually true...

also, the official name for the Debian Linux distribution is Debian GNU/Linux.

Re:GNU/Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, my Debian box distracts me like that every time I log in! That's one of the most annoying things about Linux -- they put these tags in here praising themselves (it's not like they DESERVE it or anything), and you can't even change them!

user@localhost:$ EDIT /ETC/ISSUE
bash: EDIT: command not found

See, if you try to change it, they think you're _bashing_ them, and don't let you run the editor! The nerve!

Those commie nazis will be the end of freedom as we know it!

Defies Brook's Law?

[robbyjo]

It defies Brook's Law because of its parallel release structure, extreme modularity, "trusted lieutenants" structure and as a consequence, co-ordination costs are almost negligible.

IIRC, Brook's law applies for networked communication. Hierarchical communication is therefore created to reduce this overhead. Extreme modularity doesn't prevent the merging cost. The interesting note here is that this paper doesn't address who is behind the scene to put all of this together.

I am not a Linux developer, but I believe Linus is the ruler of all of them. If he doesn't like the way things integrated, he just demote the component. Thus the maintainer does the job to comply. Recall on how many "new" components, such as ext3 and others must wait and comply to this rule? The rule is pretty rigid and widely accepted by all developers. All his "lieutenants", such as Alan Cox, also applies the same rule.

Moreover, Linux developers are all dedicated people, not just people that wants money to do their work. They want recognition. So, they will try very hard to push their "product" into the development line.

It's not just the Brook's Law, I suppose... Anyway, that's my 2c.

Trademarked software?

[swillden]

Maybe I'm just picky, but the author lost my respect by the third paragraph of the section on Linux, when he started talking about "trademarked" software. It seems like someone who is writing about the effects of different ways of creating intellectual products should have a basic, layman's understanding of Intellectual Property law, at least.

Software can be (and almost always is) copyrighted. It can also be kept as a trade secret and, in some cases and in some countries, software algorithms can be patented. But "trademarking" is something done to names and logos, not pieces of software.

Annoying.

Article is Full of Mistakes

[andrel]

This article contains a number of factual errors.

For example:
The Linux kernel is 'copylefted' software, patented under the GNU GPL, and thus, nobody actually owns it.
In fact, the relevant law is copyright not patent and most portions of the kernel are owned by the programmer who wrote them.

For example:
Similarly important was Linus's decision to create a highly portable [their emphasis] system.
In fact, the original kernel was very i386 specific and non-portable [www.dina.dk] . The portability only came later. (Torvalds did aim for POSIX compatibility to make it easier to port codes to his kernel.)

There are many other errors in the article. Admittedly, mostly minor details but they do make me wonder about the quality of the "peer-review".

Re:Article is Full of Mistakes

[countach]

Technically, you're right. But in a more
realistic sense, GPL software is community
owned.

Bill Gates' famous "Open Letter to Lobbyists"

[alienmole]

I laughed when I saw this: "Gates has played a key role in establishing software as a copyrighted good (Open Letter to Lobbyists, 1976)." Perhaps if Gates had been paying more attention to lobbyists back in '76, he could have forestalled all this pesky DOJ stuff!

Of course, the author meant to refer to An Open Letter to Hobbyists [mindspring.com]. One wonders if this mistake was made by the original author, or by well-meaning but ignorant editors.

This piece is typical first-MBA-thesis quality, and I agree it casts doubt on the quality of the peer review and the site that publishes it.

Best thing about it is the pictures

[revbob]

People in our business can talk and often write lucidly, but not one of us can draw worth a damn. Because of the pictures and tables, this is a great resource to show PHBs who need pictures and tables to draw their short attention spans back to the text.

A matter of course

[Anonymous Coward]

Do I want to skip ahead to the Linux section?

What a fine analogy of the current situation at Slashdot. Move the blocks around so that the Linux shows. What ever happened to that complex idea of balance? Do you not think that a primary function of propaganda is to dismiss all propaganda as propaganda, all but your own?

Mark as offtopic or flame as you will. But at least take a short moment to realize the herding of ideas that is before us. Thanks.

Free Technical Editing

[rlowe69]

Next week version 2 of this doc will be put on the Net after the author has a chance to read Slashdot and incorporate all of the corrections (read: criticisms) we are posting here.

Maybe I'll just save some time and frustration by skipping this one and reading the next version. :)

religion translated into management-speak

[tim_maroney]

The piece is lucid and interesting. However, it is intended to advocate rather than to critically examine the principles of the open source/free software movement. It admits that this movement is a kind of "religion," and like a religious propagandist, the author shies away from asking hard questions about central points of doctrine.

E. Raymond describes this phenomenon in this way - "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" - pointing out that security is an aspect of reliability. And such reliability can only be achieved through massive and parallel peer review.

A clear principle, to be sure, but is it a valid one? When bugs are tracked on major open source projects, such as Debian and Mozilla, the number of outstanding bugs only increases as a trend. When ESR turned up recently on the Linux kernel mailing list, he was jeered for the above maxim and told that it was demonstrably false. Robert Dewar of Ada Core Technologies -- a small business frequently cited as an open source success story -- has said that his organization is not particularly interested in outside bug fixes, since they are usually incorrect or incomplete. These anomalies and disagreements are not mentioned in the paper. A false picture of doctrinal consensus is painted instead.

Linux is synonymous to decentralisation since the project is developed by thousands of dispersed people who collaborate under no central planning.

Is it really true that Linux employs a decentralized network structure supported by volunteers? In fact it appears that hierarchical control is maintained, and maintained primarily by people who are paid to perform that job.

Nowadays, increasingly more 'big players' are joining the web: IBM, Dell, Oracle, Intel, HP, SAP and others have been tantalised by Linux and its Open Source development model, that have started investing heavily in the 'Linux platform'.

Tantalized? Oracle and SAP are proprietary par excellence. At a recent meeting with SAP in Frankfurt, I was told directly that the use of free software development tools would thwart SAP participation due to the lack of a liability structure. Dell offers Linux on its servers but that's the extent of its open source software development. This company list appears to be fabricated -- only IBM is clearly an open source backer, and even there, this year's open source campaign may have been a flash in the pan.

The management of this web depends heavily on the fact that every member of the web does not place any restrictions or rules on the other participants.

This is not at all true. In fact the large projects are tightly controlled by their inner circle, who place many restrictions on would-be volunteers. This is not news to the /. crowd.

Calling Emacs editor an editor is like calling the Earth a nice hunk of dirt. Emacs is an editor, a web browser, news reader, mail reader, personal information manager, typesetting program, programming editor, hex editor, word processor, and a number of video games. Many programmers use a kitchen sink as an icon for their copy of Emacs. There are many programmers who enter Emacs and don't leave to do anything else on the computer. Emacs, you'll find, isn't just a program, but a religion, and RMS is its saint.

This final passage is plainly ideological and even hero-worshipping. It is where the author drops all pretense at objectivity. In fact emacs is a design nightmare. It is wholly unsuitable for the use of non-engineers. If emacs is the free software ideal, that demonstrates why free software may never break out of its engineering niche. Strangely for a business-targeted paper, virtually nothing is said about customer satisfaction issues under the open source model. There are a few comments on the topic before the author gets to Linux, but once he's there, there's nothing from a process perspective on how open source development can enhance customer satisfaction. The reason may be that it can't. Programmers left to themselves create software for themselves, and programmers are strange people whose software requirements are very different from those of the public. Unless they are placed under hierarchical discipline by others more attuned to real-world requirements, they are incapable of producing software for end users. Unfortunately, there seems to be little place for that accountability to the customer in the open source development model.

Tim

Re:religion translated into management-speak

[rlowe69]

I was told directly that the use of free software development tools would thwart SAP participation due to the lack of a liability structure.

I've heard the same said about Microsoft.

Isn't it ironic that these companies claim that open source software's disadvantage is that 'no one is held accountable' YET the first thing you do when you agree to a simple software license is agree that 'this company shall not be held responsible for any damages caused by this software, (etc)'?

Oh, and hypocrytical as well.

Software "liability" is a myth perpetuated by the big boys to make tech-clueless suits nervous of open source software.

You'd think after all of these Outlook/IIS virii people (and lawyers) would point this out to their executives!

Re:religion translated into management-speak

[tim_maroney]

Isn't it ironic that these companies claim that open source software's disadvantage is that 'no one is held accountable' YET the first thing you do when you agree to a simple software license is agree that 'this company shall not be held responsible for any damages caused by this software, (etc)'?

You know, that's a really good point. I wasn't defending the liability argument so much as showing that it is of concern to many companies, including one that was strangely listed as an open source proponent in the paper. You have a good point to make about why it's a non-argument, but from a business scholarship perspective, the paper should at least have discussed this concern since many businesses share it, rightly or otherwise.

Tim

Re:religion translated into management-speak

[Ivan Raikov]

This final passage is plainly ideological and even hero-worshipping. It is where the author drops all pretense at objectivity. In fact emacs is a design nightmare. It is wholly unsuitable for the use of non-engineers.

Although I agree that the passage you are referring to is less-than-objective, don't you think you are falling in the same trap, by calling Emacs a "design nightmare," without elaborating why, and then going on to claim that it is "unsuitable for the use of non-engineers," which I'm not even sure what it means.

I personally find that Emacs has a very flexible, extensive framework, and the fact that is has survived for such a long time demonstrates its adaptability. I do recognize its technical shortcomings, such as the single-threadedness of the Lisp interpreter, or the fact that the 20.x series used integers to represent text characters -- a remnant from the 1980s, but it nevertheless manages to combine many powerful utilities and provide consistent, extensible interface to them. I have yet to encounter a functional equivalent to Emacs/XEmacs.

This is somebody's term paper

[Animats]

Read the last lines:

• "About the Author: George N. Dafermos has just completed a masters' programme in Management at Durham Business School and is currently continuing his postgraduate studies in E-Commerce at the David Goldman Informatics Centre in the U.K."

"The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and the "Halloween Memo" have covered this ground, and better.

There are major unanswered questions to ask about "open source" as a process, but this paper doesn't ask them.

Anarchy that works

[LazyDawg]

There's two kinds of anarchy: good anarchy and bad anarchy. Linux and OSS development is good anarchy. People going apeshit during a blackout is bad anarchy.

In good anarchy, people will forge alliances and teams to achieve a goal, for the betterment of all other members. While there might be some centralized control of each team, this is not neccesary, and such short heirarchies are only around long enough to get the job done.

If we took the open source model -- with maneuverable teams and management that works on things for fun or betterment of all -- to, say, industrial development, food production, etc, odds are we'd have a working anarchy there too...

Plus nobody would bother flying planes into an anarchist country's buildings, cuz there's no big evil government to overextend its power, or to launch vast retaliatory actions. Anarchy doesn't need them. Once you infect someone with the idea, they end up infecting others, and have a hard time getting convinced there's a better way :)

Re:Anarchy that works

[Hercynium]

Au contrair, your anarchist country (with it's vast natural resources and incredible infrastructure) has just become the prime target. Sure, ideas are infectious, try Communism... every dumbass undergrad I met in college *loved* the idea (except the Chinese AND the Russian engineering students, gee I wonder WHY.)

But you are talking about anarchism, so let me switch gears.

Yeah, wouldn't it be great to be able to do whatever you want/need to survive. And just think, if you kill the guy across the street for his schweet new gaming rig, there's no Big Bad Police to come after you. Oh, SURE, the neighbors might be pissed and show up at your doorstep with pitchforks, but don't worry, it's an anarchist country. They can kill you if they want to as well!!!

So of course people in general will want/need at least a little structure, right?? Just a smidge. Fine, we'll give our neighborhood a person to help with disputes/crime/emergencies. We'll call him the "Shaman."

Well, pretty soon, there's too many people for the Shaman to take care of. We'll need more structure... let's call our new leader the "Chief."

The chief, of course will have an inner circle to dispatch his orders... lets call them the "Tribal Council"

Now that we've elevated ourselves to Tribe, I don't think we need any more order. We can develop and live in peace. All among us and abroad can see our progression (and our source code, of course.) But what's this? The tribe over yonder is jealous?? They want a piece of OUR prosperity? So they invade... that's when we have (what may we call it?) a WAR!

So tribes fight and kill, some merge and form alliances, to the pont where in order for one alliance to protect themselves, they form regualar NATIONS!!! Time passes, nations evolve through progressions of leadership, growth, insurrection, merger, division... and eventually we have an EMPIRE.

So the far flung nation states start getting pissed... the frikken EMPIRE is too damn opressive, they whine... but didn't this START OUT as an ANARCHY?? Oh, NOW I REMEMBER... people simply didn't like getting KILLED by their next door neighbors. Boo-hoo, they thought it was a PAIN IN THE ASS.

So, we'll do it right this time... We'll attempt a REPUBLIC (yeah, the greeks tried true DEMOCRACIES, they got their asses kicked by nations that had smarter leaders and could make decisions faster)

So here we are, on top of the world... and other nations are STILL TRYING TO KILL US!

It makes you think (I hope)... without a government, they'd STILL be flying planes into our buildings... (Though I'm sure other countries would have beat them to it with better weapons than that.) Government or not, HUMAN BEINGS ARE VIOLENT MOTHERFUCKERS.



Oh, yeah. Getting back to the topic...

The author clearly does not believe that Open Source operates as an anarchy... rather it is specifically an unstructured medium from which profit-making organizations can arise. Of course, in order for the profit-makers to maintain a competitive edge they necessarily have to recreate some of the open-source environment. Overall, in order to succeed these companies need to do two things:

1. Maintain enough structure and intelectual protection so that profitable business can be safely and effectively conducted.
2. Maintain an open enough working environment so that the type of employees thay need, the hackers (as described in the article), will want to work there and stay as long as their talents are useful. (For example, the company has an open source project and it catches the eye of a talented programmer who otherwise would have never heard of that company. Now he works for them, and they both benefit.)

Another side benefit pointed out in the paper(well, not explicitly) is that if you use an open source management model to cater to your potiential developer/employee base your job training becomes minimal, thus saving you $$. And isn't that what it all comes down to for those filthy Americans? eh, comrade?

IMHO, I think every company has TWO customers. The END USER (The guy who buys the hamburger), and the EMPLOYEE (The guy who cooks the hamburger). Keep the employee happy, and the customer will get fewer burgers with boogers in the sauce, or less software with bugs in the code.



BTW, I understand you're not much of a rational thinker; your post reeks of it. But don't cry, just about everybody on slashdot is like that.

And if you wanna make some commentary on politics sometime POST SOMEWHERE THAT WANTS YOUR NAIVE HIPPIE ANARCHIST OPINION.

To change the world all at once is certainly a great dream for children and mental patients but give it a good long try with just ONE person at a time and you'll see why the world is like it is.

Re:Anarchy that works

[Hercynium]

Just to give LazyDawg some credit... he's a Slakware fan so he's not all bad.

Re:Anarchy that works

[corr]

I suggest that you go read the Anarchist FAQ [geocities.com]. It's amazing how little people know about anarchy, even those who think they know.

You're logic is precisely what anarchists actively protest. Anarchists would not come to the same conditioned authoritarian hierarchal solutions that you and your kind would. You've been conditioned to rely upon authority to keep your world in order - so when you attempt to contemplate a world without authority and police, without Big Brother and the Thought Police, you don't know what to think. You are, in the simplest sense, confused. I was too. At first.

The person who would "kill the guy across the street for his schweet new gaming rig" is a product of our society. Within anarchy, his motivations would not exist. Ask yourself why Mr. Killer would kill the guy across the street. What are some of the things that could spark that behavior? Maybe he is stuck in a dead-end job and makes next to nothing, while the guy with his nifty gaming rig posseses it only because he is living off the blood, sweat, and tears of hard working wage slaves. That would never exist in an anarchist society. But do not get me wrong - I am not saying that anarchy would be a Utopia. I'm just saying that your assumptions about behavior within an anarchist society are wrong. You can't expect people in a radically different societal structure to have the same moral/ethical attitudes as those within the current system.

So lets assume that Mr. Killer was just a psycopath - and that no matter how different of a society, would still kill someone for his posessions. How would the anarchist society "deal with that"? First of all, the first thing society would do is ask themselves what motivated this person to do such a thing in the first place. If it was because he was a psychopath, than that case is no different than if it were within a hierarchal society. Most crimes are crimes of passion, and thus un-preventable. The most important thing to understand is that the society will try their very hardest to find the cause of the problem and then attempt to remove, or minimize, that cause. The formation of a Shaman is not necessary, and this idea only shows how conditioned you and most others are. you are dependent on the authoritarian ideal - it directs every decision you make, believe it or not.

You assume that "people in general will want/need at least a little structure". Wrong. People in an anarchistic society will be there of their own free will, and nobody needs authoritarian structure. Alow me to quote the Anarchist FAQ:

The fact that anarchists are in favour of organisation may seem strange at first, but this is because we live in a society in which virtually all forms of organisation are authoritarian, making them appear to be the only kind possible. What is usually not recognised is that this mode of organisation is historically conditioned, arising within a specific kind of society -- one whose motive principles are domination and exploitation. According to archaeologists and anthropologists, this kind of society has only existed for about 5,000 years, having appeared with the first primitive states based on conquest and slavery, in which the labour of slaves created a surplus which supported a ruling class.

[ The Anarchist FAQ, Section A.2.3 ]

The anarchist society will have structure, it will just be very different from the structure you are familiar with. Read the FAQ, it's all there...

Really

[The Bungi]

The only thing lacking here was an entry on the table that reads "Microsoft: Sucks. Linux: Rulez"

This person is imagining the development and process management structures and practices at Microsoft. For that matter, the same conclusions apply to everything done at Oracle, Symantec, CA and IBM and everywhere else, and therefore only Linus Torvalds knows how to lead a project successfully and everyone else (that is not an open source company or project) is completely clueless and doomed to failure. Sheesh.

It's a good analysis of how one of the few really successful Open Source project models work but I can see no evidence there that Microsoft is doing something wrong (except perhaps, in the eye of the author, not giving away the code for Windows).

It's really surprising when one finds out that the enemy really doesn't breathe fire or smell of sulfur, but it's also hard to accept.

The software development process sucks more or less depending on who dreams it up and puts it to practice, but the quality of its end results have nothing to do with whether or not the source is being given away.

That is what our researcher friend is missing here.

It all makes sense now...

[Sapien__]

Those diagrams in the paper really get the point across. I mean, take a look at them; especially Figures 8, 10 and 14. Now if they don't clear things up I don't know what will. How succint!

is it just me or? ...

[OmegaDan]

Are the graphs in this document completley screwey and arbitrary? One looked like a bowl of bambo chutes, but most of them looked like things I've seen in a microscope.

Spreading a rumour in a population

[totierne]

A lot of things boil down to this,

Pax Romanus [Roman rumour]
Religions [Who believe they have The Truth]
Gossip
Jokes [e.g. spreading around the internet]
Ideas [Democracy, isms (communisim, fascism)]
Empires [EU, USSR, US 'sphere of influence']
Open Source
Marketing & Mindshare (&Microsoft)

I would be very surprised if study on the growth, or lifecycle, of any of these networks (some more decentralised than others) would not shine light on the others. No new pardigm is needed.
Just my 2 euro cents,

Turloch

Not too objective....

[marijnm]

Why doesn't the author also mention some of the problems of open-source? Stuff like:

- Boring but necessary stuff usually lies around longer.
- Development is (at first) targeted at fellow programmers, leading to higher costs for companies who wish to employ Linux because Linux admins cost more than MS operators. (As a result, it will eat more market share from commercial Unices than from NT)
- No shipping dates. Ok, MS shipping dates are not known to be the most reliable, but something is better than nothing to some managers.

Not that I care about those issues, but it would have contributed to a more credible article.

Marijn

Re:Not too objective....

[Anon-Admin]

"higher costs for companies who wish to employ Linux because Linux admins cost more than MS operators."

This has to be one of the biggest myths yet! Sure you can hire an MS Operator for 50,000$ a year or a Linux Admin for 90,000$ a year (Number from local exp.) so Linux costs more! BUZZZZZ. wrong answer. MS will give a MCSE to any high school student! You don't have to be good at it, or even really know windows but you do have to know Linux and most companies want a unix admin that has experience. Now take a Linux admin with 5
years exp. and a Windows admin with the same 5 years exp. and each will demand about the same pay.

Read "The Hacker Ethic" instead

[booch]

Many of these ideas are covered better in "The Hacker Ethic". It does a much better job than this article, and takes a more studious approach. It also includes a secton written by Linus Torvalds.