More random musings on opensource: States and Transitions

I said I would revert to the theme with which Dan Farber ended his opensource post: the inevitability of hybrids.

Why are hybrids inevitable? I think it all boils down to what Stephen Smoliar and Gordon Cook have been talking about recently, both in the shape of comments here as well as in their own blogs. [Blogs overlap and underlap all over the place, like real conversations….].

States and Transitions.

Many of us know where we want to go, but the path is not yet clear. We know what today represents. We know what tomorrow should look like. But we struggle with the in-between.

That in-between, the transition, tends to have three characteristics

1. Everyone’s Entitled to My Opinion

Polarisation: Opinions get polarised. Everything is about Big Ends versus Little Ends. Blefuscu Redux. Proprietary versus open. Petrol versus electric. VHS versus Betamax.

2. You say Tomahto, I say Tomayto

Meme battles: The battle switches to ideas and terms as we strive to make sense of it all. The language gets less civil, more intense, as passions move past simmering point. When words are the only weapons the air tends to get its own tinge of blue.

3. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose

While 1 and 2 are going on, with each side battling in glorious technicolor, the world carries on. And pragmatic people build pragmatic business models and exchange pragmatic value.

We’re all part of this ecosystem. It is said that each plant has its own specific parasite and its own specific pest, that famines were caused by people who carried plants to far-off lands without the apposite pest-parasite pairing. It’s not always clear what our roles are, who the pest is, who the parasite is. Maybe some of us who blog are pests. Maybe the media that feeds on our doings are parasites. Whatever it is, the outcome can and should be a healthy plant.

Hybrids represent transition. And some process of natural selection, as different hybrid strains battle it out for top slot; some atrophy and die, some adapt and survive.

So we have hybrids.

An aside. Hugh Macleod had this to say in a recent post. Over 95% of all Microsoft revenues come from their partners.

Think about it. What keeps the ecosystem going? Who is the pest? Who is the parasite? And is the plant healthy as a result?

Distribution channels are partners. Ecosystem members are partners. Customers are partners.

As we move from proprietary to open worlds, we are seeing another transition. The customer is becoming the partner. And not a day too soon.

Random musings on opensource

As you would expect, I spent a lot of time with my wife and children over the Easter break. And then stayed up to watch the golf. When I wasn’t doing either of these things, I was catching up on my reading.

Dan Farber’s True Nature Of Open Source post got me thinking. Go take a look yourself, Between The Lines is a place I visit regularly; in fact I read most of the ZDNet bloggers pretty often.

Dan ends with the following:

Economics don’t favor pure open source. The future is hybrids–cars, software, people, pets. It’s better for the planet…

And that’s what set me thinking. As usual, I’m sharing that thinking with you, in the knowledge it is provisional and only-partially-formed. For the sake of brevity I’m making this a bullet-point list. [Yes even I can be brief sometimes!]

1. Economics can favour opensource. Commodity economics, based on scarcity, does not. But gift economics, based on abundance, can and does favour opensource. There’s a lot we have to learn about the economics of abundance. It is at the heart of Doc Searls’ Because Effect; it connects Stallman and Raymond and Torvalds to Brand and even Garcia.

2. Gift economics relies, to quite an extent, on delayed gratification. The same delayed gratification that is at the heart of Daniel Goleman‘s Emotional Intelligence work. The same human capacity that engenders the perseverance that characterises so much of innovation, of invention. For that matter, the same human capacity that allows people to have faith.

3. The willingness to accept delayed gratification (besides being central to Goleman’s themes) is critical to building community, to engendering teamwork and collaboration. Communities are defined by their shared purposes, their treasures in heaven. They evolve and grow despite their differences, held together by their common goals. I would go so far as to say they evolve and grow because of their differences, they learn more from the differences than from the similarities. But they stick together because of their shared vision.

4. Teamwork and collaboration are essential for the success of any 21st century organisation. Collaboration within the enterprise, collaboration across the supply chain, collaboration across the customer chain. Collaboration with the customer.

5. Opensource connects the customer with the coder in different and powerful ways. Transparency of demand and supply. The impact of Linus’s Law. True future-proofing. The wisdom of crowds. Evolution of software as a result of natural selection, driven by open market adoption rather than the slave trade of vendor-locks. [If you think about it, vendor-locks are really a form of slavery].

So for me there is a golden thread that links opensource with abundance with delayed gratification with collaboration and teamwork all the way to co-creation of value with the customer. All economically sound, just not scarcity-economy sound.

What Dan says about opensource is true, but we must understand why before we can make the right calls. I will post separately about the inevitability of hybrids.

A plea

Both Chutki (at Cuckoo’s call) as well as Nandini (at Travelling Light) pointed me towards Patrick Ghose’s post about a very special reunion.

Sadly there’s no way I can make it to Cal by Thursday. Much as I’d like to.

So Bertie, Mel, Fuzz, I hope it all goes well. Wish I could be there.

Here comes the plea. Would you guys please let someone in the audience record and upload five minutes of the reunion on to YouTube or similar? That way people like me can be there, out of time, out of space yet vicariously present.

On project management and famine

A reader at Blue Meanie commented on my Amartya Sen quote, and it made me think.

I looked again at the quote.

No substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press.

And I began to wonder. Is there an equivalent for project management? Could I say something like:

No substantial project failure has ever occurred in any “independent” and “democratic” organisation with a relatively free “press”.

I am sure there is something here. I will think more about it. If any of you comes up with better paraphrases please comment away; in the meantime I will seek to replace the three words in quotation marks with more appropriate ones.

Sometimes a scream….

….is better than a thesis. Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882

A number of people directed me towards the New York Times article headlined A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs, which talks about bringing civility to the web and discusses The Blogger’s Code of Conduct, an initiative called for by Tim O’Reilly.

Read it for yourself, it is important to do that. [Too often, far too often, I’ve met people who critique something without ever having seen the something in question. This happens particularly in a systems context, but the trend seems to gloop into other spaces as well].

In itself there is nothing I can object to in the Code of Conduct. Nothing I want to object to, it looks like nothing more than a sensible exposition of YOYOW. For those who hadn’t read it before, I quote (from Wikipedia) Katie Hafner stating what Stewart Brand said about YOYOW:

I was doing the usual thing of considering what could go wrong… One of the things that could go wrong would be people blaming us for things that people said on The Well. And the way I figured you get around that was to put the responsibility on the individual. It meant that you’re responsible for your own words, and if you libel somebody they sue you, not us. And what that turned into was copyright insanity, where people thought that their precious words should not be copied in other contexts.”

Brand wanted people to be careful even then; I’d love to know what he thinks of the current kerfuffle.

For me things are simple. I am all for doing away with anonymity in the main. If people want to protect anonymity in specific contexts, that is fine as well. But I will say what I want to say onymously, and encourage others in the conversation to do likewise.

What I am far less comfortable about is the implied attempt to moderate tone.

Attempts to moderate tone via the Trojan Horse of civility are dangerous. Everyone who challenges the ideas of his day can easily be painted as not being civil. Every such challenge can be made to sound bullying and manipulative, from Martin Luther’s Here I stand, I can do no other to Patrick Henry‘s Give me Liberty or Give me Death. In fact why stop there, go back as far as the Bible. In the context of those times, Jesus Christ is meant to have used some choice words in describing the Pharisees. I wonder what today’s equivalent of “whited sepulchre” is, in the context of civility.

When you take the lyrics of John Lennon, or for that matter even some of the early Bob Dylan, civility is not the word that comes to mind. They’re passionate to the point of being irascible. When you look at Hugh Macleod‘s gapingvoid, not everything he says or draws is civil. I know Hugh and he is a very civil man. I have many T-shirts with his drawings on them. Some I would wear anywhere. Some I would not wear in front of children. Some I would not wear at all.
But the choice is mine, what I do is not because of an explicit code of conduct. I do it because. Just because. Not because of some law or the other.

Do we really want the Blogosphere to be Bowdlerised?

Personally, I believe in building people up, not cutting them down. It is something I have taken time to learn, the power that words have, the damage that badly chosen words can do. Damage to those you love, your family and your friends. So I am not embracing being uncivil per se.

God is in the Details. So is the Devil. Civility is good, it is something I believe in. What I am less happy with is any attempt to legislate for civility, either formally or informally. Why? Because civility is a big word, and can mean different things to different people at different times and in different places.

So let’s go for being onymous where and when we can. Let’s go for owning our own words.