Ideology

Tim, I win.

(To be clear, I'm not against capital and capitalism, but I'm more interested in- as Richard put it- creating the future. Capital/capitalism (and law) are primarily tools for that larger goal.)

Manhattan is so 20th century, Luis. Silicon Valley is where you go to create the future.

Oh, completely agreed. That's why I said Manhattan is my current home, but my job interviews are in Silicon Valley :) But that just emphasizes my point that SV has something besides raw capitalism and access to capital. If that was what I was interested in, I'd be staying here with my classmates, spending a few years downtown, and then trying to move out to Greenwich. But capital and capitalism are secondary interests to me, so I'll be going to SV. (Or as a partner at a large law firm - certainly making seven figures - told me: "I'm not in this for the money; if I were in this for the money, I'd be in i-banking.")

Manhattan is so 20th century, Luis. Silicon Valley is where you go to create the future.

Silicon Valley is a place for people who are obsessed with making money; it’s not just a place where capitalism is practiced, it’s the very Mecca of Venture Capital.
Revealing my biases up front: my current home (Manhattan) tends to laugh excessively at the notion that anywhere else is the Mecca of anything capital-related, so I'm perhaps a bit jaundiced.

I talk with a lot of people in the valley who aren't business people (engineers, lawyers) and never have I heard one of them say 'I came to Silicon Valley because of the venture capital.' Almost all of them (moreso amongst the engineers, obviously) say they came because 'this is where the cool stuff happens.' Obviously, the venture capital helps drive that cool stuff, but VC isn't the sole driver- NYC has plenty of capital available, and that hasn't stopped Silicon Alley from being a running joke for a decade now. SV isn't historically about VC, either. The VC came because of Stanford and the engineers who were already there, not the other way around. And as the cost of innovation decreases (thank you, GPL/Linux), people are still flocking to the Valley to found their basement startups, despite no longer needing nearly as much capital (if any.)

Avoid Regular Users translates to "open" when you can make "the community" talk to the regular users for you. It translates to "closed" when you can license your software to the Phone Company and make them talk to regular users for you.

The dominant ideology of Silicon Valley is Avoid Regular Users. Only talk to machines or to other nerds (who you make your "partners" or "channel" or "ISVs" on your platform or "community" of your open source project). The fewer regular users you deal with, the more 31337 you are.

The ideology such as it is is hatred and fear of Microsoft, and a recognition that proprietary standards in industries with network effects can lead to really lopsided outcomes and a lot of pain for the losers, which includes every SV giant that has been around for more than 10 years. Steve Jobs is a kind of Napoleon of the area, a human embodiment of a certain mindset that has an entente with the rest of the valley on the idea of owning anything too fundamental but leverages all its other market advantages to the maximum.

I also have a quibble with the idea that the GPL is particularly threatening to companies who would rather not disclose (maybe v3 is, I think that Apple bought CUPS to stop a license change and distributes curl but not wget with its GNU utils); the other edge of the sword is that GPL offers companies much more control if they own the copyright. SUN was trying to push Postgres (and couldn't get much leverage) before it bought MySQL and also GPL'd a lot of Java because the license is not actually symmetrical the way a BSD or MIT is (ie, a copyright holder can distribute private closed modifications but a user can't.) I think when companies actually need to collaborate they tend to use Apache-like agreements (Hadoop, Apache, Android), and they use GPL for competitive advantage, not that there is anything wrong with that.

Silicon Valley is a place for people who are obsessed with making money; it's not just a place where capitalism is practiced, it's the very Mecca of Venture Capital.

And yes, GPL is a two-edged sword. Used judiciously, it lowers development costs, but nobody wants to lower costs at the expense of the company's secret sauce. So the commitment to GPL is understood to mean an investment in lawyers and processes that allow the company to keep the sauce under wraps while leveraging the free stuff to the hilt.

Richard: I think you're probably right, but I'd also point out that that is a pretty broad-spread American obsession. Silicon Valley is certainly very good at it, but just as Adam said 'well, Hollywood collaborates too' I'll say 'all of America is pretty capitalist,' so saying that silicon valley is capitalist isn't terribly interesting to me, though I think definitely correct. Perhaps Tim should have asked about 'distinguishing ideology' rather than dominant?

For what it is worth as a data point on GPL and 'open' in the valley, every law firm I interviewed with this summer in the valley (extremely capitalist, extremely conservative people) saw my experience with the GPL as a huuuuuge selling point because of strong interest from their clients. To paraphrase one lawyer I interviewed with, 'everyone in silicon valley is either using or thinking about using GPL code, and they keep asking us about it.' Richard certainly has a point about people being nervous about it (which is why they are talking to the lawyers) and may have some point that all other things being equal people would much prefer BSD code, but all other things are rarely equal- there is a reason that despite the GPL people are running Linux servers and not BSD servers.

Masnick, there's no disagreeing with my assertion, I'm simply recounting my very own personal experience in Silicon Valley. There may very well be people gathering in conference rooms at this very moment planning to build the most "open" new gizmo ever; if this is happening, fine, but I'm not in that meeting.

And I've also never seen anyone deliberately choose to ship a product with GPL'd code if a BSD or proprietary alternative was just as good, and I work for company that ships GPL code. The problem is that you can run afoul of the GPL police so easily. The motto of the Purity and Openness Community is "never attribute to human frailty anything can just as easily be attributed to conspiracy."

So to Tim Lee's point, surely, dude, you aren't suggesting that Sun, Apple, and Google favor GPL code over proprietary? That's certainly not what I see in any of their histories.

Where's the source code to the Google search algorithm?

Nope, Silicon Valley is not about GPL, Wikipedia, Free Labor and socialism; it's about making money, and its cornerstone is the collection of VCs on Sand Hill Rd.

I'm going to side with Luis and say collaboration is the name of the game -- and openness needs to collaboration. I have a presentation that I've done a few times that tries to explain what makes Silicon Valley Silicon Valley, getting beyond all the obvious things and looking at the actual research on the matter. And the thing that stands out is the fact that people here talk to each other and share ideas -- even if they work for competitors. There's a lot of cross pollination of ideas as people shift jobs are talk openly with others in the industry.

Perhaps that's also "openness," though not specifically at the level of making products open -- just openness to working on ideas and taking on tough challenges. People are less worried about competition than they are about tackling the next big challenge.

As for Richard's statements, there is a subset of folks here who are definitely quite scared of GPL code. What I find amusing is they obsess over it. Others recognize that GPL code has its strengths and weaknesses and play to that. I tend to find that those who are religiously against GPL don't do very well.

I'd also disagree with Richard's assertion that no one says "let's make sure this is really, really open." I know of plenty of companies who have said exactly that -- and many more who regret starting out more closed and needing to open up later.

Richard, there are certainly plenty of successful Silicon Valley companies--Google, Sun, Apple--that use (and produce) GPLed software extensively. Does enthusiasm for GPLed code perhaps depend on which parts of the technology industry you work in?

Actually, capitalism is the dominant ideology of Silicon Valley.

Oddly, most lower level people out here tend to vote Democratic and sympathize with Moveon.org. So I suppose it's one of those serfs/overlords things.

In the 25 years or so that I've worked in this valley, I can't recall a single instance in which anybody said "Gee, let's make sure this new system we're building is really, really open." We tend to emphasize things being cool, fast, powerful, or cheap, but not open. GPL'd code is generally avoided (except for tools used in-house) because of the burden of disclosure that comes with it.

As Adam says, "open" is a very slippery term. Engineers tend to use very precise language, hence the antipathy.

Adam: partially, I oversimplified, since I assumed Tim was looking for a one-word response :) You're obviously correct to point out that there are many shades of gray and different approaches. Note that I think Tim is asking about the dominant ideology, and while Apple is (in the area of openness) a counter-example, that's a little like saying that there is one Muslim in Congress, and hence Christianity is not the dominant religion in Congress. (Not quite as extreme- there are plenty of other secretive companies in the Valley. But most of their employees very actively chafe at that bit, which I think suggests there is a lot of truth to what Tim says.)

Speaking specifically about collaboration, there are a lot of different facets. First, Valley collaboration is cross-company in a way that most places I've observed are not. At both the formal corporate level and the informal social level, information and knowledge sharing amongest employees of different companies is pervasive in ways that it is not in most industries. Second, Valley collaboration is generally very egalitarian- to oversimplify, in Hollywood, the Director Is God, and in New York, the CEO is God, and that is all there is too it. People underneath that structure obviously collaborate with each other or even occasionally with the Godhead. In the average Valley corporation, you obviously have leading lights (Larry and Sergey come to mind) but most leaders actively encourage collaboration and innovation to come up from below. With the notable exception of Jobs, there is a dearth of egomaniacal, heirarchical leaders in the valley. There are others... but Corporations is beckoning so that will have to do for the moment.

Note that my current occupation is law student, which is actively anti-collaborative. This quite possibly makes me hypersensitive to the collaboration I see when I'm elsewhere (e.g., in the Valley.)

Open standards, but not open source, are the dominating factor I would say.

And, in response to Luis's assertion that, "I’d say ‘collaboration’ is the dominant ideology of Silicon Valley, with communication and openness as valued tools by which the ideology is implemented." ... Well, that's probably right, but that describes a heck of a lot of non-Valley industries and business as well.

I know some people will scoff at this, but I think I could make a fairly powerful argument that many Hollywood companies are every bit as "collaborative" as Silicon Valley companies. Think of the number of people who have to collaborate to craft movies or video games, for example. So, with apologies to Luis, I just don't buy the argument that Silicon Valley owns the "collaborative" ethos label more than any other industry or area.

Of course, and I will leave it to Luis to respond, he may mean something entirely different by "collaboration."

As I have noted before, the problem with the open-versus-closed dichotomy we hear so much about today is that it greatly oversimplifies matters. "Open" systems are almost never completely open, and "closed" systems are almost never completely closed. There are infinite points along the open-vs-closed spectrum, and you can find a company and business models to occupy each slot.

Consequently, this makes it quite difficult to generalize and say ALL of Silicon Valley is dominated by an "openness" ethos when you can find plenty of counter-examples—can anyone say "Apple"?—as well as some operators who stress openness while tightly controlling their underlying systems or architecture—think Google and their algorithms. Likewise, I could make the arguments that some non-Valley companies who are often regarded as having more proprietary or "closed" systems actually offer a great degree of innovation and experimentation to take place at their periphery of their networks or systems.

Bottom line: One needs to unpack this openness thing a bit more and get at what we mean by it and the many flavors it comes in.

Of course, the really interesting question often raised in open-vs-closed discussions is not what it all means in a business sense or as a business model, it is whether as a matter of public policy lawmakers should be mandating one type of business arrangement or system architecture over another. That is the point where we libertarians will promptly raise the red flags and call foul. The proper policy position with regards to the open-vs-closed debate is one of agnosticism. Government should not pick winners and losers in this regard.

Almost? I'd say 'collaboration' is the dominant ideology of Silicon Valley, with communication and openness as valued tools by which the ideology is implemented. But the lines are obviously very blurred.