Open Source, Open Standards & Peer Production

What he said:

Personally, I couldn’t care less whether Jimbo is sleeping with Rachel Marsden (other than the fact that she appears to be insane), or what they say to each other in their IM chats. I don’t care whether Jimbo has had marital problems, or whether he’s had disagreements with the foundation over his expenses. All that says to me is that he’s human, and has made mistakes.

But the implication is that because he’s made some mistakes in his personal life, that somehow Wikipedia itself is demeaned or invalidated in some way, as though someone had discovered that Mother Theresa was skimming money, or running drugs through the orphanage. To me, Jimmy Wales is nothing more than the guy who set Wikipedia in motion; it has become much more than a one-man show, if it ever was. What he does in his personal life is of no interest to me, nor do I think it’s particularly relevant to what matters about Wikipedia.

I think this is roughly akin to the argument that because Enron was cooking its books, capitalism is fatally flawed. Wikipedia is a large community of people that’s fundamentally defined by its decentralized decision-making process. Jimmy Wales has more influence than anyone else in that community, but his benevolent dictatorship is sharply constrained by the need to keep the foot soldiers happy. Whether he’s personally corrupt (and just to be clear, none of the dirt that’s been dug up thus far proves anything of the sort) or not is beside the point, he’s grown the site to the point where it could easily carry on without him.

Thanks to Google, I am now addicted to the game Rock Band. I don’t own the game, but I do alternate between playing the demo at BestBuy in Pentagon City and playing the demo at the Gamestop across the street in the mall.

How can I prove that Google caused this addiction? Here I am playing Rock Band with Jillian Bandes of Roll Call in Google’s game room.

Jill’s fake drum performance far exceeded my abilities at the fake guitar. Soon after this photo was taken a tech from Google’s New York offices schooled us on how to rock Rock Band and scored a 97% on a much more difficult setting. Thanks to Adam Kovacevich at Google for featuring my silly performance on Google’s policy blog.

On a more serious note, I’m looking forward to working with Google on some of the policy issues that we’ll likely confront in the coming year. CEI is of like minds with the monolith of Mountain View on issues like privacy and competition policy. But we also disagree on policies like network neutrality and the best way to liberalize spectrum in the U.S.

Google is a great company that has created an enormous amount of wealth. I hope that their DC offices focus on creating a freer market for them to operate within and that they move away from the standard Washington favor-seeking.

Reader Deane had some great questions that I thought would be worth addressing in a new post:

Your major contention seems to be that closed-source software would be less efficient than open source because the latter is more decentralized..

but arnt’ you really talking about a management style here? I think its completely plausible for a closed-source software to have a very decentralized development process.. isnt that how google seems to do stuff? i dont know about microsoft.

Does this have anything to do with the source being open? i dont think so.

Any product development seems to need a degree of centralization, with teams, firms n so on. the degree of centralization depending on the relative cost/benefits of the management decision.

So i don’t see the point really of having a debate on open source vs closed source software. or to the fact that what’s efficient at creativity n so on, as libertarians i thought we’d trust the market to make those kind of decisions, on a product by product basis.

First of all, let me make clear that I don’t see this as a debate about “open source vs. closed source software.” Both styles of software development have their place, and I certainly wouldn’t want to be misunderstood as being opposed to closed-source development. I just think that the advantages of open source software development processes tend to be underestimated, and that in particular Lanier’s criticisms were rather misguided.

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Reader Timon has a comment that’s worth highlighting:

The other, and for me one of the foremost innovations from the freedom perspective is that Open Source is a real-world demonstration of how people can accomplish huge complex tasks without the involvement of any whip-cracking authority. That may or may not be conservative but it is definitely libertarian. Whether it is sufficiently technically ‘radical’ it is organizationally unprecedented in history, truly revolutionary in that sense.

During the 20th Century, policy debates often centered on power struggles between governments and corporations. The capital-intensive nature of a lot of industries meant that in many cases, policies that reduced government power often meant that corporations had a large influence over peoples’ lives. As libertarians, we pointed out the advantages of this arrangement: first and foremost, you have a choice about which businesses to patronize, but no choice about whether to deal with the government. It’s much better to allow the big companies that own papers liks the New York Times and the Washington Post compete for your readership than to put the government in charge of the newspaper industry. And of course, the government is a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than the largest corporations, so even if raw “bigness” is your only concern, concentrations of government power should concern you a lot more than concentrations of corporate power.

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As Adam guessed, I have some opinions about this Jaron Lanier piece on open source software. Like most of what Lanier writes, mostly found it incoherent. Lanier makes extensive use of biological metaphors, but if we’re going to make an evolution metaphor, the messy open source development pattern certainly has more in common with evolution than the rigid hierarchy of a traditional proprietary development process.

But the real problem with Lanier’s essay is that I don’t think the question makes any sense in the way that he phrases it. He’s interested in the origins of “radical creativity.” But radical creativity is almost always the product of a brilliant individual or small group creating something new from scratch. For such an individual, the open-vs.-closed dichotomy doesn’t make a lot of sense. His ability to produce a breakthrough product (think Marc Andreesen with Netscape or Larry and Sergei with Google) doesn’t have anything to do with what license he plans to release it under upon completion. As it happens, a lot of innovative stuff is produced by for-profit companies, and for-profit companies often believe they can make more money releasing their product as a closed-source product than an open-source one. But any one of those companies could have released their products as open-source products, and indeed some for-profit companies do.

Where the open-versus-closed debate matters is what happens after version 1.0 is released. Generally speaking, open software provides a better platform for subsequent development than closed products. Proprietary software products are the captives of their initial developers. If the initial developers become incompetent or decide that continued development is no longer profitable, the entire ecosystem surrounding that product can die. As a result, building a product atop a proprietary foundation is always a huge risk.

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(This is in response to a thoughtful post by Adam, who beat me to the punch, and to a controversial recent article (“Long Live Closed-Source Software!“) by the free-thinking Jaron Lanier that Adam discusses.)

No one needs to say “Long live open-source software,” because it is what it is and isn’t going anywhere. Think of it as the ground beneath our feet.

As Lanier explains, closed source is the font of nearly all paradigmatic innovation–the great revolutionary leaps. Open source contributes iterative innovation, such as the best kernel scheduler for variable workloads–this is a problem it is possible to work out slowly, with small changes over a period of years. It is also a problem that doesn’t matter at all to most users–good enough is good enough, though better is, of course, better.

Where the two forms of development come together most interestingly is the use of open source as a stepping stone for closed-source radical innovation. Asus, for example, didn’t have to step forward and create its own OS from the ground up for its EeePC. Even though the thing sports an interface unlike those in most Linux distributions, the underlying guts are the same. Would something like the EeePC even be possible without open source? Could a manufacturer afford to undertake the great expense, and gamble, of working out an OS for itself? Free software lets businesses take chances on projects that would otherwise be too expensive to devise and products that would otherwise be too expensive to market.

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I found Jaron Lanier’s provocatively titled Discover magazine essay “Long Live Closed-Source Software!” quite interesting, and I’m surprised others here (especially Tim) haven’t commented on it yet. Taking a look at the development of open source software over the past 25 years, Lanier concludes that:

Open wisdom-of-crowds software movements have become influential, but they haven’t promoted the kind of radical creativity I love most in computer science. If anything, they’ve been hindrances. Some of the youngest, brightest minds have been trapped in a 1970s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old software designs as if they were facts of nature. Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique, shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.

Before you write me that angry e-mail, please know I’m not anti–open source. I frequently argue for it in various specific projects. But a politically correct dogma holds that open source is automatically the best path to creativity and innovation, and that claim is not borne out by the facts.

The problem, Lanier argues, is that…

The open-source software community is simply too turbulent to focus its tests and maintain its criteria over an extended duration, and that is a prerequisite to evolving highly original things. There is only one iPhone, but there are hundreds of Linux releases. A closed-software team is a human construction that can tie down enough variables so that software becomes just a little more like a hardware chip—and note that chips, the most encapsulated objects made by humans, get better and better following an exponential pattern of improvement known as Moore’s law.

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The Register‘s latest rant against Wikipedia was sent to me by one of the people mentioned in the article. It purports to explain how “the Wikipedia elite [has decided] to take a topic as weighty as the health of US financial markets under its control without informing the public of its decision.” What follows is a long and rambling story about a dispute between Overstock.com head Patrick Byrne and Businessweek reporter Gary Weiss. Weiss, apparently, is the puppetmaster behind a grand conspiracy theory designed to keep the public in the dark about the evils of a practice called naked short selling by preventing a link to Byrne’s PowerPoint presentation on the subject from being linked to from the relevant Wikipedia paget.

Seriously. A guy named Judd Bagley soon got into an edit war over the link with another user. Bagley wanted the link included, the other user didn’t. Bagley thinks the other user is Weiss. Weiss says he’s never edited Wikipedia. The article goes on to explain more disagreements Bagley had with various Wikipedia editors. Not having followed the story, I have no idea if the ban of Bagley was appropriate. But there certainly doesn’t appear to be anything in there that comes close to damning evidence of Wikipedia’s “inner circle.”

Even the Register admits that “There’s no denying that Judd Bagley is, shall we say, overzealous when it comes to Wikipedia.” There’s clearly a lot of personal history here that I don’t know, and so I have trouble getting too worked up over the fact that Wikipedia has been attempting to block him from the site. What the article does not do is provide any evidence that there’s more going on here than a petty personality conflict. There’s a lot of rumor and innuendo, but no specific evidence of wrongdoing by “the Wikipedia elite,” whoever that is. And the Register article has an hysterical tone that makes me extremely skeptical of the scant evidence it does provide. El Reg clearly has an axe to grind, and so I’m not about to take their word for it when they say there’s a grand conspiracy going on.