The Success of Open Source

JoshuaDFranklin writes "When confronted with the reality of Open Source, academics often ask what processes allow it to happen. In his new book The Success of Open Source, Berkeley professor Steven Weber answers that question. He presents a clear, logical picture of how Open Source development works in a variety of projects, and comes to the intriguing conclusion that the process may be generalizable to other areas of production. The results, he argues, would 'make the consequences of the first-generation Internet seem quaint.'" Read on for the rest of Franklin's review.

The Success of Open Source
author	Steven Weber
pages	320 pages, 5 line illustrations
publisher	Harvard University Press
rating	9
reviewer	Joshua Daniel Franklin
ISBN	0674012925
summary	Weber argues that the success of Open Source is due to a production process than may be generalizable to other arenas.

Weber is an academic and makes no apologies for it. He is not presenting an exciting new business plan, advocating a particular method of software development, or calling hackers to revolution. He is simply describing his findings after extensive research of the Open Source development process and drawing conclusions from them. As such, this book may not appeal to everyone in the Open Source community. However, Weber's ideas are timely and informative for anyone who wants to explain or advocate Open Source. He likens his work to The Machine that Changed the World, the story of Toyota's production method (224):

That book made two simple and profound points: The Toyota "system" was not a car, and it was not uniquely Japanese. The parallels are obvious. Open source is not a piece of software, and it is not unique to a group of hackers.

The first part of The Success of Open Source is a historical case study that examines the origins and social development of the Open Source community. It begins with Unix and hacker culture. For those who have read Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and Peter Salus' A Quarter Century of UNIX, there is little new material here, but Weber offers a new and interesting perspective on the events. For example, he offers the insight that "hacker culture" existed before widespread network connectivity, drawing into question whether cheap bandwidth is really essential.

From there, he covers the development of the BSDs, Apache, and Linux, focusing again on social structures. He describes diverse events such as the messy expulsion of Theo de Raadt from the NetBSD core, the creation of Apache by an informal group of interested developers, and the establishment of Alan Cox as de facto Linux networking lieutenant. Weber draws from an impressive array of firsthand accounts, including mailing lists, websites, conference speeches, and personal interviews.

I get some interesting trivia out of this, such as Larry McVoy's original Unix is dying troll (98). Unfortunately, since Weber's narrative is mainly topical, it is occasionally redundant in telling one story from multiple social angles. Other claims are close to flamebait, such as suggesting that Richard Stallman is an example of a "failed leader." (168)

For the second half of the book, Weber moves on to Explaining Open Source in the terms of his discipline, political economy. He sees two broad categories of principles to the Open Source process: Microfoundations, including individual motivations and the economic logic of the collective good; and Macro-Organization, solving the problems of coordination and complexity. (133) While I doubt each reader will catch every academic nuance in these chapters, Weber is thankfully sparing in his use of specialized vocabulary and writes his overall argument in clear, easy-to-follow logic.

This section also contains the most insightful observations in The Success of Open Source. While there are too many to list here, one is the concept of Open Source Software as antirival. As more copies are made and put into use, value increases as a result of a larger market and the small percentage of users that contribute bug reports and possibly patches. This turns the traditional "free rider" problem into an advantage.

Though Weber does not mention this in the text, one can see part of this principle in proprietary vendors' providing free downloads or turning their backs on rampant piracy. It also does not take a great leap of logic to see application of the antirival model to other fields such as music or academic research.

As is customary in social science literature, Weber uses his conclusion to both recap his argument and to raise questions for future direction of research. What is the best organization method for property distribution, as opposed to the current methods based on exclusion? How can the Open Source production process be used effectively to improve prospects for the developing world? What is the best way for closed, hierarchical systems to interact with open, network-based ones? While some of the issues involved are offtopic for this book, hopefully future work will examine these questions in depth.

Though Open Source has been mentioned in many recent works, The Success of Open Source is the first academic book that focuses on the Open Source community as its object of study. It gives a readable, thought-provoking, and occasionally funny account of what Open Source is and means, making it an extremely valuable resource for those who want to engage and discuss these issues on an intellectual level. As Weber states, his positive, constructive outlook "may not be fully satisfying, but it's not a bad place to start." (272)

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Joshua Daniel Franklin is a graduate student at the University of Washington's Information School. This review may be redistributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. You can read the table of contents, preface, and an excerpt of the first chapter of The Success of Open Source at the Harvard University Press website. The reviewer's website has an list of errata. You can purchase the The Success of Open Source from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Easy on the hyperbole, pal

"The results, he argues, would 'make the consequences of the first-generation Internet seem quaint.'"

Open source is great and all, but isn't this statement a bit over the top? It almost sounds like he's trying to sell something. Just MHO.

Re:Easy on the hyperbole, pal

You never know. The strength of the Internet has always been in providing access to information - more than in selling things or distributing media. Those things work, but getting information to the masses has always been the Internet's strong point. Who would have thought that this same medium would allow people to collaborate and build an operating system? Without the internet it wouldn't have happened, and now that operating system is a crucial part of what runs the Internet. We might look back on the development of the Linux kernel and other open source software as one of the strong points of the Early Internet.

Re:Easy on the hyperbole, pal

I think you're just interpretting it as over the top, perhaps getting a little too defensive. Looking at the incredibly brief history of the Internet and the already widespread impact of the increasingly virtually instant propgation of information, all the things we're doing now will seem primitive 10 years from now (and open source is of course inextricably linked with that). He's not denouncing the importance of the progress so far, he's just saying that it grows exponentially and as grand as things may seem now, they will be dwarfed in no time.

Re:Easy on the hyperbole, pal

If we consider the fact that writing is never a neutral endeavor, then he is trying to sell something. He is trying to sell his idea and insight. At one time, a couple of hundred years ago a few people tried to sell the idea of open (free) capitolism, and it worked. The argument on open source is not just about whose operating system supports the most digital camera's. It is an attempt to convince the world that there may be a better method than the one that exists. It is NOT an attempt to overthrow the capitolist system, but a way to improve the current system through open standards.

Thank you for your ear.

scm

Come together, right now....

I have a question. Why should Open Source software and closed source software be at each other's throats? Shouldn't the two be cooperating more than fighting? Here's the advantages I see to each of them:

Open Source

• Spreads the cost of software across a large number of parties
• Encourages interoperability and standards support
• Prevents the wheel from being reinvented every day

Commercial/Closed Source

• More time focus on usability
• Quick response to critical issues
• More resources to throw at high quality software

These advantages are not mutually exclusive. Thus I might use Apache as my webserver because of its tremendous standards compliance and support, while I'll use Oracle for its scalability, performance, and corporate support. Instead of deciding that everything should be open or closed, let's focus on making things open when it makes sense, and supporting things that are closed when it makes sense.

Re:Come together, right now....

Why should everything I write be open source? I mean, come on, some of the stuff I write is aweful and I'd hate for anyone to have to deal with it.

Re:Come together, right now....

because they're different and opposite in philosophy

Says you and Stallman. The Apache people seem to think otherwise. And I'd say that they've done an exceedingly good job of making their point. As have the Mozilla people.

Stallman's philosophy is that every piece of software in existence should be free. That raises the question of who's going to pay for all the R&D, usability studies, artwork, customer support, etc? In Apache's case, a large number of interested corporations and individuals have helped foot the bill for a greater cause. Same for the Mozilla project, save that Netscape/AOL ate a large portion of the bill. RedHat, SuSE, and other commercial entities continually help foot the bill for GNOME, KDE, the kernel, dev tools, and other desktop development.

And yet, SuSE (wisely) held onto YaST and SAX long enough to give themselves an edge over the competition. If it was open source to begin with, what would SuSE's advantage have been?

The ideas are not mutually exclusive. Only the desire to not work together makes them mutually exclusive.

Re:Come together, right now....

``Stallman's philosophy is that every piece of software in existence should be free. That raises the question of who's going to pay for all the R&D, usability studies, artwork, customer support, etc?''

This is strikingly similar to the main argument in support patents (and I mean any patents, not just software patents). I used to agree with it, until I sat down and thought about it more thoroughly. Here's my view:

You ask who pays for research (development, support, etc.)?
Answer: The people who have an interest in it. As it stands, that is corporations: by innovating (developing new products, giving better support, etc.) they gain an edge over the competition. If they can protect their invention with a patent, they can even exclude (or collect royalties, licensing fees, etc. from) competitors, allowing them to make even more money. Ultimately, this is said to benefit the consumer, as they get better products.

What set me thinking is the flaw (as percieved by me) in the patent system. The idea is to reward companies for doing (and supposedly funding) research. Now, consider one such company inventing something and patenting it. This grants them a monopoly on their invention, even if another group comes up with the same invention independently (and thus, supposedly, having done just as much work for it). I find this unfair and objectionable.

So let's see if there is a solution. I think we want R&D to continue, service to improve, etc. etc. Now, it's corporations funding these things, and then, in return, being granted some privileges, even in cases where this is not completely desireable. These companies ultimately present the bill to the people who benefit from the investments (after all, companies want to survive, too). But what if these people funded it all in the first place?

What I envision is a system where funds are collected and pooled (like taxes), so that they can be spent on R&D and the like in a manner that all can benefit from. With the results available for everyone to use, there can be competition, and the market forces can work for us all instead of for the select few who control the patents etc.

Re:Come together, right now....

What I envision is a system where funds are collected and pooled (like taxes), so that they can be spent on R&D and the like in a manner that all can benefit from.

This is exactly the R&D system used in the former Soviet Union. A good friend of my was a physicist there and worked, of course, for the state, and told me how it worked. A certain portion of proceeds collected from other ventures went to R&D. Of course, the "public" owned the output, because the public did the investment.

The USSR invested amazing amounts of money in R&D, and had some good results (for those that don't know, a USSR scientist came up with the stealth technology the US makes such great use of). However, by any measure I've seen, money invested in research produced less results in the USSR than in the US. Also, in spite of patents, etc, the US public gets the greater good (see health care statistics - mortality, fertility, life expectancy - in the US as compared to the USSR in the same time periods).

The collectivization of R&D sounds good on paper, but the "real world labrotories" of the USSR, N Korea, China, and so on, have had poor luck (even resetting for factors like development level). Countries with privatized R&D (US, Western Europe, Southeast Asia) seem to get more bang for the research buck.

Re:Come together, right now....

I find your example of Oracle/Apache quite funny, being Oracle comes with two Apache products, httpd and tomcat.

I, also, use Oracle, but that's because of an interoperability requirement that was pre-existing to my ability to put Linux across my server base. Otherwise I'd have used PostgreSQL.

Re:Come together, right now....

I find your example of Oracle/Apache quite funny, being Oracle comes with two Apache products, httpd and tomcat.

It actually makes my point more than anything. The fact that Oracle supports and ships these open source products along with their commercial products shows that the two can and should work together. Take the best from both worlds instead of fighting to have one community with all the power.

Re:Come together, right now....

> while I'll use Oracle for its
> scalability, performance, and corporate support.

There's probably a size/performance metric floating around here too. For database under a terabyte, PostgreSQL [postgresql.org] is probably fine.

The question then becomes - how much data will I be packing into this database? If it's only a few hundred GB or so... PostgreSQL may be sufficient. And the customer will save a lot of money... good times.

Re:Come together, right now....

US$15,000 for a single CPU instance of Oracle.
But, they won't sell it to you without software updates support for the first year.

That's some serious dough... but the good news is that if you don't run Oracle in a commercial/production environment, you can download and develop against it for free. So, really, Oracle also tries to benefit from the OpenSource mentality. If no OpenSource project supported Oracle directly, then Oracle wouldn't be nearly as popular. So, they let you download and run it (and have allowed this for over 6 years).

Re:Come together, right now....

There is no deadline so there is plenty of time to focus on usability.

It took Mozilla five years to reach a usable product. Opera did it in two. There is a certain advantage to customer facing commercial software. At the very least it plugs a market demand until the software becomes a commodity. It also blazes a trail so that commodity software like Open Source can do it right.

Sadly I don't see many closed source projects that have very good usability so that reasoning evidently doesn't work out very well.

Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop, RealPlayerOne, MSAccess, Quicktime (Sorenson), and iTunes are all examples of commercial products that people pay money for, and would like to have ported to Linux. While Open Source alternatives exist for some of them, they are either comparatively immature or have certain legal encumbrances that prevent them from being introduced into a commercial distro.

I get much quicker times on support from most opensource.

How long did GNOME 2.0 go without a way to add or remove menu items via the GUI? 2.0-2.4, that's how long. Open Source addresses things faster if it's in their interest or meets their ideals. That's not a criticism, but a fact of how it works. Money talks, and the potential loss of a support contract will often make software houses bust their butts to solve problems and add features that would normally be considered "boring".

Good point, but...

Not sure they are at each other's throats. Open Source seems to be ok with closed source software. Where the hurt begins is with the fear closed source companies have of Open Source.

Based on fears alone, a lot of FUD is used to "fight fire with fire". It's like a common spousal spat that occurs when one spouse feels threatened by statements the other has made, which were entirely misinterpreted -- but were interpreted as such only because the defensive one has some unfounded fear on the subject.

The attacks fly until the defensive one gets their assurance that their worst fear won't happen.

When the FUD flies, the Open Source community reacts. Naturally.

Re:Come together, right now....

It's quite simple. If my business sells closed-source software and that's my main way of profitting, I don't want you finding alternatives, or using OSS which interoperates flawlessly. As m$ has shown w/ word processors, ability to interoperate w/ the current status quo is a huge selling point. As a company that sells software my goal is to sell as much as possible. Format lock-in becomes a good thing, I don't want you looking at any alternatives or anything that interoperates that isn't mine.

For a dominant company, there is no advantage I can see to anyone but the consumer to interoperating w/ competing software (competing in the non-monetary sense in this case) and some possible disadvantages if there software is better than mine.

Re:Come together, right now....

Are you working for Apple or what? =)

But serious: They (Apple) are playing this game very well - they released Darwin, support OpenDarwin, Konqueror, Fink, etc. while keeping their crown jewels (Quicktime, Quartz, Cocoa, ...) locked away.

And what do we get out of this hybrid approach? The best Desktop Unix ever. Lets hope more companies choose this approach!

The traditional "free rider" problem

This turns the traditional "free rider" problem into an advantage.

How exactly? What forces the free riders to assume the cost burden of open source development? Is there an open source tax that I'm not aware of?

IANAE, but AFAIK traditional free rider problem would involve a public good that everyone can exploit provided by some subset of the population that has some sort of cost involved in providing that good. Open source development is still costing the developers something, regardless of the fact that it may be for the greater good.

Re:The traditional "free rider" problem

IANAE, but AFAIK traditional free rider problem would involve a public good that everyone can exploit provided by some subset of the population that has some sort of cost involved in providing that good.

IANAE either, but it seems to me that the important advantage of open source is that it makes no difference how many free riders there are, since the only additional cost to the developers is bandwidth, which is cheap or even free (if you use sourceforge, or something similar). So even if one out of a thousand users contributes something, and there are millions of users, things are going quite well, despite 99.9% free riders.

Re:The traditional "free rider" problem

As more copies are made and put into use, value increases as a result of a larger market and the small percentage of users that contribute bug reports and possibly patches. This turns the traditional "free rider" problem into an advantage.

The idea is that as your usage base grows, some small percentage of that base will become active contributors, as opposed to just free riders. In other scenarios not involving open source the opportunity for a free rider to become a contributor may not exist, or be limited to bug reports. Basically, with open source increasing your market share can also mean increasing your development force.

I'm not sure that turns free riders into an "advantage" per se, but it does help explain how open source projects scale. Clearly, giving "free riders" a chance to not be free riders if they have the talent and time is better than making it impossible for them to contribute.

*BSD product support specialist. Man !

Speaking of *BSD, I once had to make a technical support call to them. Here's the guy [syr.edu] they have answering the phone these days. He told me he had to go into the vault to find the answer to my question. He put me on hold, and then the line went dead.

Excellent use of /. mods.

"...interesting perspective on the events."
"...Larry McVoy's original Unix is dying troll"
"...it is occasionally redundant in telling one story from multiple social angles."
"This section also contains the most insightful observations..."
"Other claims are close to flamebait..."
"However, Weber's ideas are timely and informative..."
"and occasionally funny account of what Open Source is and means,"
"While some of the issues involved are offtopic for this book, ..."

Now the only question remaining after this review is whether any portions of the book may be over or underrated. Also, knowing if the author has a karma bonus would help in what is otherwise a tie of positive and negative mods.

Applications to business

I've thought long and hard about how the ideals of Open Source could impact businesses. Primarily of interest to me has been the concept of "intrinsic motivation" wherein people are about a thousand times more likely to be motivated to do something if they choose to do it themselves, rather than being told to do it. Open Source then obviously has a massive advantage over the traditional business model in terms of motivation, because I can simply log on to Sourceforge, and choose to participate in a project which interests me personally, without having been told to do it.

I'm not aware of any statistics in this area, but I'd love to see them - for example, just how much more productive is somebody working on Open Source than in a traditional business setting? Further, can this model be made to work in a business setting at all? Take a simple example of a business which allows its employees to work on whichever projects they choose. The company designates a specific set of projects, and you are allowed to migrate at will to those which most interest you. What would be the end-game of this strategy? Would programmers, for example, congregrate around the most "interesting" projects, even if those projects weren't the best for the financial health of the company? Would other projects die for simple lack of interest? What guarantees do we have that the optimal solution in terms of "interest" would be the optimal solution in terms of "making money"?

Of course, the Open Source model really points to a future where corporations are largely irrelevant, and everybody participates in an extremely organic, dynamic model where we all act as free agents, working on the projects which most interest us. But, don't even get me started on that topic.

Nonetheless, I can't find anything which is more intelectually fascinating than these topics at the present time. Anthropic cosmological principle! Bah!

Re:Applications to business

> just how much more productive is somebody working on Open Source

Well, this is impossible to mesure. As programming is mainly a creative activity, you cannot mesure productivity per hour.
A programmer doesnt only work while typing in a text editor, but also in the bus/his car, while thinking about how to resolve a bug. And this "off-the-keyboard" activity is impossible to track accurately. Especially as a motivated programmer will probably have more "off-the-keyboard" activity then a payed drone who doesnt identify with his programm.
So to compare productivity, the best you can do is compare people who work full-time and compare productivity per day. As people who work full-time on an open source project are most likely paid to do so, a true comparision between the occasional volunteer and a payed employee is impossible.

However, a comparision between employeea who choose their project freely and normal employees who were ordered to do one would be interesting.

> a business which allows its employees to work on whichever projects they choose.

Google allows (and encourages) it's employees to work part of their time (10% IIRC) on whatever they want.
Almost everything Google offers (beside standard search) actually started as such a "pet project".

Different viewpoints...

I find it exceedingly niave to make broad assumptions about any one methodology as the 'one' methodology. Perhaps we have an inate xenophobia that prevents us from accepting different systems without judgement (look at religeon if you want some examples of how destructive this can become).

The reality is more complex than most of us can comprehend. Additionally, external issues outside of the applications themselves also hold sway (boycotting particular companies due to questionable business practices, for example).

It is not an all or nothing proposition. As time goes on the environment changes, and some activities become more effective than others.

Commerce will not disappear, neither will groups of people working freely for a common goal, without expectation of compensation.

I've had a lot of experience with this!

All of the oozing and bleeding goes away after a while. Then you're left with just the smell... Success!!

Oh... Success of Open Source. Whoah...never mind.

Consider open source in publishing, food & pha

The concept of open source is now thoroughly out of the box, and already moving into areas beside IT. Here are a few examples:

1) ""Researchers in Australia and India are sidestepping agriculture patents held by the likes of Monsanto and DuPont to develop competitive technologies and foods (such as a high-protein potato) that are, by design, open and unrestricted. In pharmaceuticals, India is skirting patents to create generic AIDS drugs that are orders of magnitude cheaper than those made by the transnational drug companies ..."
http://www.mediajunk.com/public/archives/200 4_01.h tml

also,
http://www.wacc.org.uk/modules.php?name=N ews&file= article&sid=815

2) The California Open Source Textbook Project www.opensourcetext.org has been created to provide open source printed books for K-12 students in California, and eventually the world.
www.opensourcetext.org

3) MIT's OpenCourseWare project has been created to provide free university curriculum to students
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

4) Wikipedia is a great example of open source content with it's many open source projects
www.wikipedia.org

There are many other examples, currently, of cooperative efforts to share intellectual capital.

Easy measure

Use dollar, money talks, even for open source. [yahoo.com]

so that's what Gorby meant by assymetcic response

Heh, Soviet response to SDI is to slowly take over software market and then spread communism into all areas of human live! Slow and easy revolution :)

I can see it now...
"If you are licensing under GPL you support communism!"

Antirival?

While there are too many to list here, one is the concept of Open Source Software as antirival. As more copies are made and put into use, value increases as a result of a larger market and the small percentage of users that contribute bug reports and possibly patches. This turns the traditional "free rider" problem into an advantage.

Do you mean the 'network effect'? If so, why not call it that? "Antirival" -- sounds like a bug spray.

Business?

Well, it isn't much different from, for instance, a business where workers can contribute ideas (and are rewarded for it)...

Sounds like a novel version of...

Eric S. Raymond's Homesteading the Noosphere [catb.org]. Am I the only one who likes this essay more than The Cathedral and the Bazaar? Don't get me wrong, I like both essays, but Cathedral was primarily about one person realizing the promise of open development. Noosphere was his plunge into the why of it. Raymond argues that open source operates as a gift culture, where status comes from giving the best gift instead of acquiring the best toys.

Sounds like the academic world is starting to think along the same lines.

adeu,
Mateu

Weber is PolySci, not tech

I'm surprised the reviewer of this book didn't take the time to look into Weber's history. He's not a tech guy; he's a professor of political science. Not long ago I downloaded a draft paper of his called "The Political Science of Open Source" which seems to be a draft for this book - the themes overlap nicely. Weber is working at BRIE, the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy. The paper is here [berkeley.edu].

Re:Link to book

Yeah, there was a Barnes and Noble link directly in the Article - at the same price as Amazon. I thought I'd point that out lest anyone think that your Amazon link is somehow superior to the BN link that's already in the article.

Yes, it's at the bottom, and nobody reads the entire book review.

Re:where is the original article?

It's a book review!

The original article can be found at here [amazon.com], among other places.

I know, I know, it was (probably) a joke. It's just that the "Insightful" moderation I saw got to me.