opensource.html
What Business Can Learn from Open Source

August 2005(This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2005.)Lately companies have been paying more attention to open source.
Ten years ago there seemed a real danger Microsoft would extend its
monopoly to servers.  It seems safe to say now that open source has
prevented that.  A recent survey found 52% of companies are replacing
Windows servers with Linux servers.
[1]More significant, I think, is which 52% they are.  At this point,
anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to
explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon
don't.But the biggest thing business has to learn from open source is not
about Linux or Firefox, but about the forces that produced them.
Ultimately these will affect a lot more than what software you use.We may be able to get a fix on these underlying forces by triangulating
from open source and blogging.  As you've probably noticed, they
have a lot in common.Like open source, blogging is something people do themselves, for
free, because they enjoy it.  Like open source hackers, bloggers
compete with people working for money, and often win.  The method
of ensuring quality is also the same: Darwinian.  Companies ensure
quality through rules to prevent employees from screwing up.  But
you don't need that when the audience can communicate with one
another.  People just produce whatever they want; the good stuff
spreads, and the bad gets ignored.  And in both cases, feedback
from the audience improves the best work.Another thing blogging and open source have in common is the Web.
People have always been willing to do great work
for free,  but before the Web it was harder to reach an audience
or collaborate on projects.AmateursI think the most important of the new principles business has to learn is
that people work a lot harder on stuff they like.  Well, that's
news to no one.  So how can I claim business has to learn it?  When
I say business doesn't know this, I mean the structure of business
doesn't reflect it.Business still reflects an older model, exemplified by the French
word for working: travailler.  It has an English cousin, travail,
and what it means is torture.
[2]This turns out not to be the last word on work, however.
As societies get richer, they learn something about
work that's a lot like what they learn about diet.  We know now that the
healthiest diet is the one our peasant ancestors were forced to
eat because they were poor.  Like rich food, idleness
only seems desirable when you don't get enough of it.  I think we were
designed to work, just as we were designed to eat a certain amount
of fiber, and we feel bad if we don't.There's a name for people who work for the love of it: amateurs.
The word now has such bad connotations that we forget its etymology,
though it's staring us in the face.  "Amateur" was originally rather
a complimentary word.  But the thing to be in the twentieth century
was professional, which amateurs, by definition, are not.That's why the business world was so surprised by one lesson from
open source: that people working for love often surpass those working
for money.   Users don't switch from Explorer to Firefox because
they want to hack the source.  They switch because it's a better
browser.It's not that Microsoft isn't trying.  They know controlling the
browser is one of the keys to retaining their monopoly.  The problem
is the same they face in operating systems: they can't pay people
enough to build something better than a group of inspired hackers
will build for free.I suspect professionalism was always overrated-- not just in the
literal sense of working for money, but also connotations like
formality and detachment.  Inconceivable as it would have seemed
in, say, 1970, I think professionalism was largely a fashion,
driven by conditions that happened to exist in the twentieth century.One of the most powerful of those was the existence of "channels." Revealingly,
the same term was used for both products and information:  there
were distribution channels, and TV and radio channels.It was the narrowness of such channels that made professionals
seem so superior to amateurs.  There were only a few jobs as
professional journalists, for example, so competition ensured the
average journalist was fairly good.  Whereas anyone can express
opinions about current events in a bar.  And so the average person
expressing his opinions in a bar sounds like an idiot compared to
a journalist writing about the subject.On the Web, the barrier for publishing your ideas is even lower.
You don't have to buy a drink, and they even let kids in.
Millions of people are publishing online, and the average
level of what they're writing, as you might expect, is not very
good.  This has led some in the media to conclude that blogs don't
present much of a threat-- that blogs are just a fad.Actually, the fad is the word "blog,"  at least the way the print
media now use it.  What they mean by "blogger" is not someone who
publishes in a weblog format, but anyone who publishes online.
That's going to become a problem as the Web becomes the default
medium for publication.  So I'd
like to suggest an alternative word for someone who publishes online.
How about "writer?"Those in the print media who dismiss the writing online because of
its low average quality are missing an important point: no one reads
the average blog.  In the old world of channels, it meant something
to talk about average quality, because that's what you were getting
whether you liked it or not.
But now you can read any writer you want.  So the average
quality of writing online isn't what the print media are competing
against.  They're competing against the best writing online.  And, 
like Microsoft, they're losing.I know that from my own experience as a reader.  Though most print
publications are online, I probably
read two or three articles on individual people's sites for every
one I read on the site of a newspaper or magazine.And when I read, say, New York Times stories, I never reach
them through the Times front page.   Most I find through aggregators
like Google News or Slashdot or Delicious. Aggregators show how
much better 
you can do than the channel.  The New York Times front page is
a list of articles written by people who work for the New York Times.  Delicious
is a list of articles that are interesting.  And it's only now that
you can see the two side by side that you notice how little overlap there is.Most articles in the print media are boring.  For example, the
president notices that a majority of voters now think invading Iraq
was a mistake, so he makes an address to the nation to drum up
support.  Where is the man bites dog in that?  I didn't hear the
speech, but I could probably tell you exactly what he said.  A
speech like that is, in the most literal sense, not news: there is
nothing new in it.
[3]Nor is there anything new, except the names and places, in most
"news" about things going wrong.  A child is abducted; there's a
tornado; a ferry sinks; someone gets bitten by a shark; a small
plane crashes.  And what do you learn about the world from these
stories?  Absolutely nothing.  They're outlying data points; what
makes them gripping also makes them irrelevant.As in software, when professionals produce such crap, it's not
surprising if amateurs can do better.  Live by the channel, die by
the channel: if you depend on an oligopoly, you sink into bad habits
that are hard to overcome when you suddenly get competition.
[4]WorkplacesAnother thing blogs and open source software have in common is that
they're often made by people working at home.  That may not seem
surprising.  But it should be.  It's the architectural equivalent
of a home-made aircraft shooting down an F-18.  Companies spend
millions to build office buildings for a single purpose: to be a
place to work.  And yet people working in their own homes,
which aren't even designed to be workplaces, end up
being more productive.This proves something a lot of us have suspected.  The average
office is a miserable place to get work done.  And a lot of what
makes offices bad are the very qualities we associate with
professionalism.  The sterility
of offices is supposed to suggest efficiency.  But suggesting
efficiency is a different thing from actually being efficient.The atmosphere of the average workplace is to productivity what
flames painted on the side of a car are to speed.  And it's not
just the way offices look that's bleak.  The way people act is just
as bad.Things are different in a startup.  Often as not a startup begins
in an apartment.  Instead of matching beige cubicles
they have an assortment of furniture they bought used.  They work
odd hours, wearing the most casual of clothing.  They look at
whatever they want online without worrying whether it's "work safe."
The cheery, bland language of the office is replaced by wicked humor.  And
you know what?  The company at this stage is probably the most
productive it's ever going to be.Maybe it's not a coincidence.  Maybe some aspects of professionalism
are actually a net lose.To me the most demoralizing aspect of the traditional office is
that you're supposed to be there at certain times.  There are usually
a few people in a company who really have to, but the reason most
employees work fixed hours is that the company can't measure their
productivity.The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can't make people
work, you can at least prevent them from having fun.  If employees
have to be in the building a certain number of hours a day, and are
forbidden to do non-work things while there, then they must be
working.  In theory.  In practice they spend a lot of their time
in a no-man's land, where they're neither working nor having fun.If you could measure how much work people did, many companies
wouldn't need any fixed workday. You could just say: this is what
you have to do.  Do it whenever you like, wherever you like.  If
your work requires you to talk to other people in the company, then
you may need to be here a certain amount.  Otherwise we don't care.That may seem utopian, but it's what we told people who came to
work for our company.  There were no fixed office hours.  I never
showed up before 11 in the morning.  But we weren't saying this to
be benevolent.  We were saying: if you work here we expect you to
get a lot done.  Don't try to fool us just by being here a lot.The problem with the facetime model is not just that it's demoralizing, but
that the people pretending to work interrupt
the ones actually working.  I'm convinced the facetime model
is the main reason large organizations have so many meetings.
Per capita, large organizations accomplish very little.
And yet all those people have to be on site at least eight hours a
day.  When so much time goes in one end and so little achievement
comes out the other, something has to give.  And meetings are the
main mechanism for taking up the slack.For one year I worked at a regular nine to five job, and I remember
well the strange, cozy feeling that comes over one during meetings.
I was very aware, because of the novelty, that I was being paid for
programming.  It seemed just amazing, as if there was a machine on
my desk that spat out a dollar bill every two minutes no matter
what I did.  Even while I was in the bathroom!  But because the
imaginary machine was always running, I felt I always ought to be
working. And so meetings felt wonderfully relaxing.  They
counted as work, just like programming, but they were so much easier.
All you had to do was sit and look attentive.Meetings are like an opiate with a network effect.  So is email,
on a smaller scale.  And in addition to the direct cost in time,
there's the cost in fragmentation-- breaking people's day up into
bits too small to be useful.You can see how dependent you've become on something by removing
it suddenly.  So for big companies I propose the following experiment.
Set aside one day where meetings are forbidden-- where everyone has to
sit at their desk all day and work without interruption on
things they can do without talking to anyone else.
Some amount of communication is necessary in most jobs, but I'm
sure many employees could find eight hours worth of stuff they could
do by themselves.  You could call it "Work Day."The other problem with pretend work
is that it often looks better than real work.  When I'm
writing or hacking I spend as much time just thinking as I do
actually typing.  Half the time I'm sitting drinking a cup of tea,
or walking around the neighborhood.  This is a critical phase--
this is where ideas come from-- and yet I'd feel guilty doing this
in most offices, with everyone else looking busy.It's hard to see how bad some practice is till you have something
to compare it to.  And that's one reason open source, and even blogging
in some cases, are so important.  They show us what real work looks like.We're funding eight new startups at the moment.  A friend asked
what they were doing for office space, and seemed surprised when I
said we expected them to work out of whatever apartments they found
to live in.  But we didn't propose that to save money.  We did it
because we want their software to be good.  Working in crappy
informal spaces is one of the things startups do right without
realizing it.  As soon as you get into an office, work and life
start to drift apart.That is one of the key tenets of professionalism. Work and life
are supposed to be separate.  But that part, I'm convinced, is a 
mistake.Bottom-UpThe third big lesson we can learn from open source and
blogging is that ideas can bubble up from the bottom, instead of
flowing down from the top.  Open source and blogging both work
bottom-up: people make what they want, and the best stuff
prevails.Does this sound familiar?  It's the principle of a market economy.
Ironically, though open source and blogs are done for free, those
worlds resemble market economies, while most companies, for all
their talk about the value of free markets, are run internally like
communist states.There are two forces that together steer design: ideas about
what to do next, and the enforcement of quality.  In the channel
era, both flowed down from the top.  For example, newspaper editors
assigned stories to reporters, then edited what they wrote.Open source and blogging show us things don't have to work that
way.  Ideas and even the enforcement of quality can flow bottom-up.
And in both cases the results are not merely acceptable, but better.
For example, open source software is more reliable precisely because
it's open source; anyone can find mistakes.The same happens with writing.  As we got close to publication, I
found I was very worried about the essays in 
Hackers
& Painters
that hadn't been online.  Once an essay has had a couple thousand
page views I feel reasonably confident about it.  But these had had 
literally orders of magnitude less scrutiny.  It felt like
releasing software without testing it.That's what all publishing used to be like.  If
you got ten people to read a manuscript, you were lucky.  But I'd
become so used to publishing online that the old method now seemed
alarmingly unreliable, like navigating by dead reckoning once you'd
gotten used to a GPS.The other thing I like about publishing online is that you can write
what you want and publish when you want.  Earlier this year I wrote
something that seemed suitable for a magazine, so
I sent it to an editor I know.
As I was waiting to hear back, I found to my surprise that I was
hoping they'd reject it.  Then I could put it online right away.
If they accepted it, it wouldn't be read by anyone for months, and
in the meantime I'd have to fight word-by-word to save it from being
mangled by some twenty five year old copy editor.
[5]Many employees would like to build great things for the companies
they work for, but more often than not management won't let them.
How many of us have heard stories of employees going to management
and saying, please let us build this thing to make money for you--
and the company saying no?  The most famous example is probably <NAME>,
who originally wanted to build microcomputers for his then-employer, HP.
And they turned him down.  On the blunderometer, this episode ranks
with IBM accepting a non-exclusive license for DOS.  But I think this
happens all the time.  We just don't hear about it usually,
because to prove yourself right you have to quit
and start your own company, like Wozniak did.StartupsSo these, I think, are the three big lessons open source and blogging
have to teach business: (1) that people work harder on stuff they
like, (2) that the standard office environment is very unproductive,
and (3) that bottom-up often works better than top-down.I can imagine managers at this point saying: what is this guy talking
about?  What good does it do me to know that my programmers
would be more productive
working at home on their own projects?  I need their asses in here
working on version 3.2 of our software, or we're never going to
make the release date.And it's true, the benefit that specific manager could derive from
the forces I've described is near zero.  When I say business can
learn from open source, I don't mean any specific business can.  I
mean business can learn about new conditions the same way a gene
pool does.  I'm not claiming companies can get smarter, just that
dumb ones will die.So what will business look like when it has assimilated the lessons
of open source and blogging?  I think the big obstacle preventing
us from seeing the future of business is the assumption that people
working for you have to be employees.  But think about what's going
on underneath:  the company has some money, and they pay it to the
employee in the hope that he'll make something worth more than they
paid him.  Well, there are other ways to arrange that relationship.
Instead of paying the guy money as a salary, why not give it to him
as investment?  Then instead of coming to your office to work on
your projects, he can work wherever he wants on projects of his own.Because few of us know any alternative, we have no idea how much
better we could do than the traditional employer-employee relationship.
Such customs evolve with glacial slowness.  Our 
employer-employee relationship still retains a big chunk of
master-servant DNA.
[6]I dislike being on either end of it.
I'll work my ass off for a customer, but I resent being told what
to do by a boss.  And being a boss is also horribly frustrating; 
half the time it's easier just to do stuff yourself than to get
someone else to do it for you.
I'd rather do almost anything than give or receive a
performance review.On top of its unpromising origins, employment
has accumulated a lot of cruft over the years.  The list of what
you can't ask in job interviews is now so long that for convenience
I assume it's infinite.  Within the
office you now have to walk on eggshells lest anyone 
say or do
something that makes the company prey to a lawsuit.  And God help
you if you fire anyone.Nothing shows more clearly that employment is not an ordinary economic
relationship than companies being sued for firing people.  In any
purely economic relationship you're free to do what you want.  If
you want to stop buying steel pipe from one supplier and start
buying it from another, you don't have to explain why.  No one can
accuse you of unjustly switching pipe suppliers.  Justice implies
some kind of paternal obligation that isn't there in
transactions between equals.Most of the legal restrictions on employers are intended to protect
employees.  But you can't have action without an equal and opposite
reaction.  You can't expect employers to have some kind of paternal
responsibility toward employees without putting employees in the
position of children.  And that seems a bad road to go down.Next time you're in a moderately large city, drop by the main post
office and watch the body language of the people working there.
They have the same sullen resentment as children made to do
something they don't want to.  Their union has exacted pay
increases and work restrictions that would have been the envy of
previous generations of postal workers, and yet they don't seem any
happier for it.  It's demoralizing
to be on the receiving end of a paternalistic relationship, no
matter how cozy the terms.  Just ask any teenager.I see the disadvantages of the employer-employee relationship because
I've been on both sides of a better one: the investor-founder relationship.
I wouldn't claim it's painless.  When I was running a
startup, the thought of our investors used to keep me up at night.
And now that I'm an investor,
the thought of our startups keeps me
up at night.  All the pain of whatever problem you're trying to
solve is still there.
But the pain hurts less when it isn't
mixed with resentment.I had the misfortune to participate in what amounted to a controlled
experiment to prove that.  After Yahoo bought our startup I went
to work for them.  I was doing exactly the same work, except with
bosses.  And to my horror I started acting like a child.  The 
situation pushed buttons I'd forgotten
I had.The big advantage of investment over employment, as the examples of open
source and blogging suggest, is that people working on projects of
their own are enormously more productive.  And a
startup is a project
of one's own in two senses, both of them important: it's creatively
one's own, and also economically ones's own.Google is a rare example of a big company in tune with the forces
I've described. They've tried hard to make their offices less sterile
than the usual cube farm.  They give employees who do great work
large grants of stock to simulate the rewards of a startup.  They
even let hackers spend 20% of their time on their own projects.Why not let people spend 100% of their time on their own projects,
and instead of trying to approximate the value of what they create,
give them the actual market value?  Impossible?  That is in fact
what venture capitalists do.So am I claiming that no one is going to be an employee anymore--
that everyone should go and start a startup?  Of course not.
But more people could do it than do it now.
At the moment, even the smartest students leave school thinking
they have to get a job.  
Actually what they need to do is make
something valuable.  A job is one way to do that, but the more
ambitious ones will ordinarily be better off taking money from an
investor than an employer.Hackers tend to think business is for MBAs.  But business
administration is not what you're doing in a startup.  What you're
doing is business creation.  And the first phase of that
is mostly product creation-- that is, hacking.  That's the
hard part.  It's a lot harder to create something people love than
to take something people love and figure out how to make money from
it.Another thing that keeps people away from starting startups is the
risk.  Someone with kids and a mortgage should think twice before
doing it.  But most young hackers have neither.And as the example of open source and blogging suggests, you'll
enjoy it more, even if you fail.  You'll be working on your own
thing, instead of going to some office and doing what you're told.
There may be more pain in your own company, but it won't hurt as
much.That may be the greatest effect, in the long run, of the forces 
underlying open source and blogging: finally ditching the old
paternalistic employer-employee relationship, and replacing it with
a purely economic one, between equals.
Notes[1]
Survey by Forrester Research reported in the cover story of
Business Week, 31 Jan 2005.  Apparently someone believed you have to
replace the actual server in order to switch the operating system.[2]
It derives from the late Latin tripalium,
a torture device so called because it consisted of three stakes.
I don't know how the stakes were used.  "Travel" has the same root.[3]
It would be much bigger news, in that sense, if the president
faced unscripted questions by giving a press conference.[4]
One measure of the incompetence of newspapers is that so many
still make you register to read stories.  I have yet to find a blog
that tried that.[5]
They accepted the article, but I took so long to
send them the final version that by the time I did the section of
the magazine they'd accepted it for had disappeared in a reorganization.[6]
The word "boss" is derived from the Dutch baas, meaning
"master."Thanks to <NAME>, <NAME>, and <NAME> for reading drafts of this.French TranslationRussian TranslationJapanese TranslationSpanish TranslationArabic Translation
