The Limits of Open Source
From JumpStart’s Ray Leach comes this link to an article not about the wisdom of crowds, but about The Ignorance of Crowds.
In a Booz Allen Hamilton strategy+business article, author Nicholas Carr argues that “the open source model can play an important role in innovation,” but that it is important always to bear in mind any model’s limitations. With respect to open source,
“[P]eer production works best with routine or narrowly defined tasks that can be pursued simultaneously by a big crowd of people. It is not well suited to a job that requires a lot of coordination among the participants. If members of a large, informal group had to coordinate their efforts closely, their work would quickly bog down in complexity….
“Because it requires so many ‘eyeballs’, open source works best when the labor is donated or partially subsidized. If Linus Torvalds had to compensate all his ‘eyeballs’ he would have gone broke long ago.
“Third, and most important, the open source model–when it works effectively–is not as egalitarian or democratic as it is often made out to be. Linux has been successful not just because so many people have been involved, but because the crowd’s work has been filtered through a central authority who holds supreme power as a synthesizer and decision maker….Torvalds has gathered a hierarchy of talented software programmers around him to help manage the crowd and their contributions. It’s not a stretch to say that the Linux bureacracy forms a cathedral that coordinates the work of the bazaar and molds it into a unified product.”
Yes, you read that right–on this tenth anniversary of the publication of Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar, a little historical perspective helps to shed a great deal of light on how there really isn’t an either/or choice between top down vs. bottom up, between the cathedral approach and that of the open bazaar. It takes both, working together in harmony, to accomplish truly great things. Something we all need to bear in mind as we look for ways to improve the economy of Northeast Ohio: There is no “them.” There is only “us.”
We are all in this together. And it takes all of us, working together, each in our own unique role and way, to build both the cathedrals and the bazaars that make for a thriving, robust economy.
After all, even Raymond eventually sold the publishing rights to his work to a conventional publishing company…