Monthly Archives: June 2003

Open Source Cartoons

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A little list of the various line drawings I’ve encountered over the years of what open source is. These cartoons are both delightful and bloodless.

  • Open source is a kind of public good.
  • Open source is a kind of club good.
  • Open source is a kind of standards making.
  • Open source is a tactic in standards battles for limiting the rents captured by firms that implement the standard.
  • Open source is r-selected, closed source is K-selected
  • Open source as a labor movement, a guild, a profession; i.e. it can adopt any and all the functions those institutions sometime play.
  • Open source is a search device in that the users, who are closer to the actual needs, search for innovations that the project can then aggregate.
  • Open source as a portfolio of options, i.e. the project relinquishes to users control over an interesting options space.
  • Open source as a fast first mover response to network effects.
  • Open source as an aggregation of intrinsic motivations
  • Open source as a projection of selfish motivation
  • Open source as political revolution
  • Open source as lower classes slipping around vested interests
  • Open source as the immune response of the commons.
  • Open source as a negotiation framework.
  • Open source as mutual aid society
  • Open source as club of enthusiasts
  • Open source as platform competitor
  • Open source as publish-or-perish analogy
  • Open source as manifestation of alpha-male motives
  • A scheme for users/buyers to coordinate their activities with supplier firms, i.e a more flexible substitute for rigid contracting or standards.
  • A scheme that allows user/buyers to eliminate the need for a supplier (or temper supplier power) by working in common cause to create the supply.
  • A means for network owner to temper or eliminate the power of adjacent networks.
  • A negotiation framework where the code provides a document around which the parties organize the negotiation.
  • A means to coordinate the creation of a pool of knowledge or IP.
  • Just another massive multi-player game.
  • A form of community specialized on the code as the point of common cause.
  • Supply for the latent demand for quality collaborators around anything (or alternately a particular) common cause.
  • Stone Soup: A point of rendezvous (kernel, seed crystal) for small contributions that when aggregated creates something tasty.
  • An organization who’s parts are homologous to those found in any software firm, but interestingly different.
  • Open source is a hot dog and bun economy, (e.g. manufacturing/services) where we give away the hot dogs.

I’m sure there another few dozen I’ve forgotten.

Intrinsic Motivations

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I enjoyed listening to Teresa Amabile last week at a workshop on Open Source. She was asked to do color commentary on three papers that were looking into the motivations of contributors. Dr. Amabile’s work is on creativity and one of her key findings is that creativity thrives under intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic motivation.

Though she didn’t mention it my favorite detail from that literature is that engaging in heroic fantasies is almost certain to put the kibosh on creativity. A more robust finding is that if you give rewards for an activity, for example you reward kids for reading books, you get a increase in the behavior, but the moment you stop rewarding the behavior stops. You can actually use this to stop bad behaviors; you reward them (cash is good) for a while and then stop.

There is a lot more to Amabile’s work beyond the intrinsic/extrinsic motivation aspect!

In the best traditions of scholarly work she pointed out that all the data in the papers seems to support that theory. While that is somewhat true I must say that only just barely, since the papers were sadly lacking in questions that might have teased out possible intrinsic motivation. That said I do agree that there is a lot of activity in the open source community that is fundamentally driven by intrinsic motivations.

So later I got to poking around on the net looking at usages of the term. “Intrinsic motivation” is certainly less popular with the hard science crowd and more popular with the more empathetic crowd. Presumably Teresa is working to fix that.

What I was seeking was to put some meat on the bones of that term. What exactly is an intrinsic motivation? Well the obvious answer is (in the negative) is not external.

  • Forced serving of another.
  • Decided service of another.
  • Attitudinal service.

The last choice is certainly more intrinsically motivated than the first.

Or we might look for an enumeration of different kinds of intrinsic motivations; here’s a nice, but very incomplete (for example artistic motivations are missing), list.

  • Principled protection
  • Supportive assistance
  • Instructive Investigator
  • Practical Advisor
  • Charitable Sponsor
  • Organizing Director
  • Merciful Empathizer

Both those lists are taken from here, a firm that sells one of those personality-profiling services that are so popular in magazines. They sell them to companies, presumably as a way stir the pot. Such things are fun if you treat them lightly.

What’s interesting about those lists is how they harken back to the religious ideas of a “calling.” Now that is sure to drive economists crazy. Of course we could call it lock-in.

Artichokes

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artichoke.gif
At dinner the other night somebody at an adjacent table was pondering that age old question; “who first realized you could eat an artichoke?” The question arose again at brunch yesterday, once again in a conversation on my periphery. I think the Gods are trying to tell me something.

The answer is, I’m sad to say all to painfully obvious. Innovation happens on the periphery. Where the need is greatest or the skill is most intense. Often where both are found together. That huge pool of poor starving people are continuously research on our behalf to discover new foods. Occasionally they discover something neat and the well feed among us get the benefit.

This model; where the vast unwashed masses do the work and a few aggregate the benefit lies at the heart of any number of modern successes. Open Source, when it works best, is a fine example – hundreds of millions of users, tens of thousands of developers, maybe a thousand contributing developers, a dozen developers doing the design and coordination and out pops Apache. Or Amazon, millions of readers, a few write reviews, Amazon captures them and out pops a unique product differentiator – one that’s hard to replicate because of the network effects. Or EBay with all those buyers and sellers rendezvousing around what is a really simple web site. Or Google using all those carefully hand crafted links as tiny votes to ranks the web’s pages. Or Microsoft with it’s thousands of developers striving to push the envelope of their platform to new heights.

Tim O’Reilly get’s it.

Shunning the Nonstandard

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I interviewed for a job many years ago. A job I really wanted. These folks were working on what I, at the time, considered the most interesting problem on the perimeter of personal computing. How to empower users to author, not just use, software. The problem of how to drag programming out of the ivory tower and into the hands of the unwashed masses.

I knew withing 30 seconds of the first interview that I wasn’t going to be taking the job. The first question, the first interviewer asked: “You know .. You didn’t fold your letter correctly?”

As a dyslexic I knew that was that was the end of that that. I’d played that role way too many times. Folks in that role get shot in the first act to demonstrate for the audience the seriousness of the situation.

I have friends who find a story like that incomprehensible. They are outraged, bewildered – this is very nice.

But, in point of fact, it’s entirely straight forward what’s going on there. I can even be sympathetic, to a degree. The
dude, having recieved your resume, email, essay, article, solicitation, whatever in the mail, has zero information with which to judge it. So before giving it any expesive close analysis he takes short cuts. He makes a quick breadth first sweep to collect what little data he can. He takes note of the paper, the typeface, the layout, etc. For most people spelling and grammar are included in that sweep.

For most people the skill of picking out errors of grammar and spelling is as costly as noticing a lump of coal on a bed sheet.

The goal of this quick pass is to save time, to decide if further deeper consideration is worth the bother. This low information decision making about
when to further connect is – i think it is now clear – what creates the perferencial binding that gives rise to power-law distributions. It is the micro-payment of predjudice.

So consider this fragment off somebody else’s blog.

“Secondly, spelling. I cannot stress enough how important this is. Mr Fred Grott is a good example of that schizoid dyslexic child your mother should have warned you about but likely didn’t. He not so much types out comments as spasms uncontrollably in the vicinity of a keyboard and hopes for the best. This my friend will not impress any girls, I assure you. Strangely enough, Mr Grott somehow manages to produce a vaguely coherent blog, suggesting a fairly severe case of Jekyll and Hyde. It’s fine if you misspell the odd word or two; everyone does it. However, to go out of your way to consistently spell badly, sometimes as much as 50% of your words, is just bad manners. Mr Grott, I hereby crown you village idiot, and you get to wear the hat for the rest of the week. Don’t worry though, once I start mauling JBoss I expect some of their apologists will soon claim your crown.”

I have spent a lot of my life learning to smile and move on in the face of such rants. My blindness to the lumps of coal on a bed sheet leads other people to label me an idiot. Presumably their generosity is intended to inspire me to better myself. The goodnews is technology is devaluing this skill. From both ends. The skill is, it turns out, reasonably easy to mimic with computers. The skill is becoming far less valued as the foundations of the ivory tower of hyper-editted copy are undercut in the flood of fresh content.

Landlord of Blogdom

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Tim Oren’s blog is rising fast in my news reader, where I keep the blogs sorted in a rough rank order.

I highly recomend his recent essay No eBay of Blogs with which I largely agree.

But, on the otherhand… I think many people are missing out on how strong the synergies are between the client and the server in blogdom. That comments, trackbacks, identity, reputation, and moderating will all strengthen that entanglement. If that grows stronger it will be harder and harder to avoid a potent network effect emerging – one that appears to me to be much stronger to me than the document exchange network effect that makes the Microsoft Office so strong a monopoly. If you owned that, you’d get the hub, you’d be the eBay, you’d be the landlord. An embrace and extend strategy looks quite plausible here.

I don’t know if that’s any different an insight than saying the same thing about the client/server synergies around HTTP. Nobody grabbed that hub. Many tried though. The build out was so extremely fast, making hubs easier to grab since that reenforces the power-law. But the early winners were open, so at least the server side has managed to remain reasonably open. The client side remains in contest, but some poeple think the good fairy Ms. Open is starting to gain the upper hand there too.

One reason the landlord of HTTP was hard to grab is that powerlaws are more likely to emerge when new entrants lack the knowledge to make informed choices so they just pick the market leader. In the HTTP case folks installing servers tended to be highly knowledgable about the lock-in risk and hence valued open. I mention this because I don’t think that’s true about the majority of folks that will be adopting a blogging solution. If the client and server become one, as I suspect is likely, then that will further reenforce the emergance of a landlord of blogdom.

Bullies

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The ever interesting Josh Mashall writes early today about the various colors of lying that folks are trotting out in an attempt to comprehend or forgive the misleading evidence used to justify that war in Iraq was necessary urgently, now, immediately, with no time to build a concensus.

These folks are bullies. They bullied our allies. They bullied the intelegence community. Thy bullied the military planners. They bullied the congress. Given the oportunity they bullied everyone who asked a question.

To me, the question of “did they lie” vs. “were they victums of a massive self delusion” misses the point entirely. Lies and delusions are the direct result of encouraging bullies.

We need to be clear about this.

Russian Roulette

The death of a friend playing Russian Roulette shaped the life of the author of the fun eccentric little book Fooled by Randomness.  Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a mathematically inclined option trader who would like us all to realized that when you encounter a wildly successful individual you should pause and consider, was he lucky or was he skillful? He points out that the world is quick
to offer you bets in the form of Russian Roulette you get a 1 in 6 chance at a million dollars, but the sixth time you die. Assuming your life is worth more than million dollars then the house wins
these bets on average.

Unlike Russian Roulette the terms of these bets are rarely so obviously presented. The house, or the Gods in this case, can offer you quite a spectrum of deals. First there is the subtlety of computing your chances in more complex games. If the Gods let you double your money, or die, on each bet and play with a gun that has 100 cylinders and one bullet how many rounds, on average, do you get to play? Second the Gods rarely give you terms that straight forward.

Taleb’s approach to this is to assume that people are way to optimistic and then use option trading to bet against them. Of course that requires a sufficiently mature and liquid market; one
that can support options trading. It’s unlikely you could use his approach to bet against the optimists that trade on eBay. Most forums that life is played out in lack the market mechanisms of Taleb’s scheme depend upon.

This is a great strategy to adopt when a Bull market transforms into a Bear market. So it’s not surprising that these days a publisher decided he ought to invite Taleb to write a book.

There is a story in Jane Jacob’s book about French Canadian separatism.  She argues that the reason that Toronto grew larger than Montreal was that the after the second world war Toronto was much more aggressive in taking risks. Meanwhile Montreal, an older wiser city, was more
conservative. Montreal had seen many a fad and so guarded it’s resources more carefully. Meanwhile the Gods arranged that for the 30 years following the second world war the games of Russian Roulette offered were very generous. Toronto thrived. Montreal fell to second rate and with it many of the hopes of French Canadians for independence.