Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

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.

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

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.

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.

I had the pleasure of crossing paths with Kieran Healy on Thursday. He’s much less sanserif than he appears in his blog.

A lovely example of Bruce Sterling’s hypothisis that the implosion of privacy will make it very very hard for the elites to maintain any sort of reputation.