Success of Open Source
I took a recommendation off of Ed Felten’s site the other day, “The Success of Open Source” by Steven Weber, and am really glad that I did. It was amazingly relevant to many of the challenges and issues Second Life faces around building a world based on user-creation.
Weber’s book takes a rigorous look at the phenomenon of open source, starting with its history. He traces open source from the creation of Unix, the development and fracture of BSD, and Richard Stallman and the FSF all the way through the impact of Linux, the many significant open source applications, and where open source is going. This section was interesting, if somewhat of a review.
The book really takes off is when he starts analyzing the mechanisms of open source development. Many – and I’ve done this as well – make the mistake of talking about the “emergent” or “self-organizing” nature of open source projects as if this actually explains anything. Weber calls us all on it:
[S]elf-organization is used too often as a placeholder for an unspecified mechanism. The terms becomes a euphemism for “I don’t really understand the mechanism that holds the system together.”
Weber continues:
Self-organization often evokes an optimistically tinged “state of nature” narrative, a story about the good way things would “naturally” evolve if the “meddling” hands of corporations and lawyers and governments and bureaucrats would just stay away. Of course, those non-self-organized organizations have their own narratives, which portray the state of nature as a chaotic mess.
To pose two state-of-nature narratives against each other creates a battle of assumptions, a tournament of null hypotheses, which is not productive. The underlying presumption – that there is in fact a state of nature without human agency -- is even more damning to the discourse when we are talking about something like software code or knowledge production more generally. There is no state of nature on the Internet. Knowledge does not want to be “free” (or for that matter owned) more than it wants to be anything else.
His point is that the critical issues – such as how we architect power relationships between creators and consumers – are those that are worth discussing and that implying that they are self organizing impedes necessary debates but taking focus off of the debates themselves. Technologists and designers have options, they should understand the implications of those choices.
In order to understand the implications, Weber divides the analysis of open source motivations into four distinct bins:
- Bottom up individual motivations
- Top down economics motivations
- Issues of coordinating large teams
- Issues of managing complexity of large projects
Many of these topics have been discussed before, but Weber goes into a lot details in defending each one, a well as clear separations between them. Of the most interest to me was comparing his description of the requirements for “general organizational principles for distributed innovation” to where Second Life is today.
- Empower people to experiment – SL hits this one out of the park. Yes, we have classes of experiment that we still need to enable, but SL is a great place to explore different ideas.
- Enable bits of information to find each other – Not so much. Obviously, the economic motivations help this somewhat, but we clearly have a lot of work ahead of us on search.
- Structure information so it can recombine with other pieces of information – A bit of hit and miss, here. On the one hand, watching how content has evolved within SL, it is clear that ideas and concepts are being shared, remixed and improved all the time. However, we haven’t even begun to explore the potential of full connecting to the web, allowing SL content to be shared and remixed in other contexts, or enabling web content to really become part of SL. Moreover, there are many ways in which scripts could better communicate, build on one another, and be shared between residents and projects.
- Create a governance system that sustains the process – Here I see residents taking the lead, exploring mediation, creating a notary to grant documents more power, and feeding back lots of ideas to us. However, we still have a lot of room for improvement, from expanding the flexibility of groups to questions around estates.
Weber also has a section on some of the secondary benefits of user-creation and participation. While all are told in the context of open source development, they apply quite well to the SL community.
Weber concludes the book with some hypothetical qualities that drive good open source style projects – whether software projects or otherwise – but he seemed to downplay one important issue. Games are the common example of an underrepresented class of open-source software project. To me this has always seemed to be the result of mechanisms aligning to reward good code rather than good products. In some situations there is almost no practical difference between the two – gcc and Linux being the obvious examples – but in others, product features other than code quality are the driving factors in whether or not the product will succeed. The various Linux desktops fall into this category. Despite this minor quibble, the concluding section broadly opens ideas around open source development and left me excited about ways to make SL better for both creators and consumers.
“The Success of Open Source” provides a wealth of information and theory. I highly recommend it.