Sunday, 14 Aug 2005

Paul Graham on the similarities between Open Source and Blogging

Paul Graham recently put up an essay based on a talk he gave at OSCON. The title, “What Business Can Learn from Open Source” is somewhat bland, but the subtitle hints that you’re in for a doozy: “Open source and blogging have a lot in common: amateurs, workplaces, bottom-up organization and startups.”

Increasingly over the last few years, quite a number of us have progressed from being excited about the fact that Open Source works to pondering why it works. What I love about Paul’s essay is that it abstracts some of what we’ve learned and applies it to other phenomena that are rocking the foundations of the conventional world.

He makes an interesting point about blogs - because of the network effects and the low barrier to entry, there is indeed a lot of rubbish out there, and at first, it’s easy to dismiss amateur work as substandard compared to what “professional” writers:

“…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…

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.”

He then reaches back to the Open Source world and shows how the forces create better software are also at work in the publishing world. And that’s going to change everything. It already is:

“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.”

In fashion reminiscent of Scott Adams’s the Dilbert Principle, Paul spends a lot of time rubbishing the conventional practices in corporate organizations:

“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 point that so many tend to miss is that it isn’t that corporations are evil, but rather that corporations tend to cause so many counter-productive behaviours that the net effect is dramatic inefficiency.

I know a lot of hackers who are frustrated with modern organizations. Simply raging against the system won’t fix it. Essays like this, however, point the way to a very different future — if you’ve got the courage to break free of the safe world that results from not rocking the boat.

AfC

paulgraham-on-opensource, posted by Andrew Cowie in mlp at 2005-08-14T02:39:48Z

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