On Being Open
7 Posts tagged with the linux tagOriginal post from July 7th, 2007. Original post here:
http://talk.bmc.com/blogs/blog-carl/steve-carl/ who-do-you-serve-open-source-and-community
This one, like Piers Anthony, made a trilogy of what was originally one post:
Proving I have moderately high geek points, the title of this post were the opening words of the "Babylon 5" spinoff series "Crusade". These words seem to work here for todays post, especially if you know the TV show at all. To be clear if you are not Crusade-saavy: It was not a show about the religious Crusades of 1095 to 1291. It was about a race against time to save Earth from a plague created by an alien species. In typical Babylon-5 tradition (and in fact, all good Science Fiction), the show was as much about current times as anything happening in the future.
I always wanted to get a Babylon 5 quote in here. 
When this question (or is it questions) are applied to the topic de-jour: Open Source, today's post becomes a sequel to my previous one about “Egoless Programming”.
Common and Community... same root word.
Open source is at its core a community of the creative. The innovative. A community of people with common interests and talents. There are many communities kinds of communities of common interest. Sporting events are communities of people with a common interest in what sport in under way. The first time my new-at-the-time wife came with me on a ski trip, she found out she was not a member of the community of skiers. She did not know that when we were not on the slope that all we would talk about was skiing. Even though we had just battered ourselves all day long against a mountain, where the mountain once again won as it always does, we would sit in front of cheap TV set that evening after dinner (where we recalled the days events in gory detail) glued to Warren Miller films about people who ski way better than we do. She thought when we weren't skiing we might do other things. I don't think it was self delusion: I just don't think she understood.
Other communities: I have been to many Mensa events: my wife is a member. I know people in the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA). I literally knew rocket scientists when I was at NASA. Here at BMC I have met many product authors and product designers. Smart / creative people are still in need of the same things as anyone else. They need community. They need other people. It is just that what they are communicating with each other about can sometimes make ones brain hurt. When inside their community, they are in their zone of comfort, and they speak of things in ways that people outside the community just may not so easily grok. It is not meant to exclude, it is just a feeling, kind of like that one you get when you arrive home after a long trip. Kind of like the feeling I just got getting in a Heinlein reference and a Babylon 5 reference all in one post...
I used to date a waitress. When she was with me, and we were with co-workers and friends of mine from the computer world, she had no idea what we were talking about. She once asked me later if we were “being dirty” because to her ears, all the talk about bits and bytes had a vaguely obscene sound to it. She was an intelligent person with other interests: just had never been involved with computers at all. This was before PC's were commonplace too. Did I mention there is dirt younger than me? I did make an effort not to talk about computers after that when she was with me. She still dropped me like a hot potato. I'm pretty sure it was the computer thing...
Common... or maybe uncommon interests and abilities
Here is another bit of the puzzle: intelligence / creativity is not something that can be measured and expressed in a unitary number like IQ. See Stephan J. Gould's excellent book "The Mismeasure of Man" for why we humans are far too complicated for such simplistic ideas too have any application beyond that of party novelty. No believers in hogwash like "The Bell Curve" need apply here. That is a different community. The community of people that wish life was easier and less complex than it really is, where people all line up in neatly classifiable little rows.
I know this about IQ to be true because I am an example of it. Please do not interpret this as braggadocio or any other form of feeling self important, but I am not of average IQ. At any given point in my life though, I have taken IQ tests and returned scores that varied by over 30 points!
One reason is that intelligence and ability is about exercise: the more one uses their brain, the better it becomes. Another is that tests measure different aspects of ability will return different results relative to the average. If you were to measure my ability to perform math today relative to when I studied it in school, there would be a huge drop off. In my job I use math, but only parts like statistics and double entry bookkeeping and the like. Some geometry, for building houses. Anything else would require intensive study to refresh. All skills are organic when one is a human being.
This is deeply complicated: I am not even talking here about Savant talents, or cultural bias in testing. You have to read Gould's book or something like it to get ones head around the whole thing.
Add in now "interest". One is far more likely to gain skills or stay fresh and skillful if it is an area of interest. Over time I think this will tend to skew, so that one becomes even better at areas of interest, and even worse in other areas. This is probably further reinforced by community. When you are with like minded people, you tend to focus on your areas of common interest.
The results of the community that is Open Source are tangible, if not easily measured. Results like Linux, Gnome, KDE, Xorg OpenOffice, GIMP, Beryl/Compiz, On and on and on.
How does one create an environment of creativity ?
If you look at some of the most successful companies these days it is clear that they have internal environments that encourage creativity and innovation. Apple is clearly one of them: I am writing the first draft of this entry on my iPhone in an antique mall while my wife does ... something.... in a cabinet full of antiques. Not sure exactly what she is doing: I am not a member of the community on antiques. And I'm blogging on my iPhone, so I am not paying attention either. In that world of antiques I have found that my tastes run to either the very cheap or the very expensive. I can not tell the difference between one or the other when I am looking at it. I do know that most of what I like is often called "Art Deco". But I digress.
Another example company would of course be Google.
I admit freely that as a manager I have stolen freely from Google, specifically their 70/20/10 "rule". I have been around creative geniuses all my life (my dad has something like 17 patents he can talk about at NASA) so I know a good idea when I lift one. I have written to some degree about some of the creative things we are up to inside R&D support, but since I adopted this rule, some major changes have occurred in the team. I'll get into those in future posts. Some really good things happening here though.
Most corporate environments are not so flexible as to be able to deal well with the needs of the creator. Humans being what they are, needs are met one way or another. A stultifying day job is a recipe for creating all nighters, and weekends of creative frenzies. Or drinking. Sometimes both. They are not mutually exclusive.
Intersection
I was reading a very interesting article this last weekend in the New York Times about amateurs contributing to the Space Program (subscription may be required) . The article was interesting, and well written but at one point the author was essentially going to sleep during an in depth technical discussion that was occurring between those he was writing about. Even though the author was interested enough in the topic to do the research and write the article, they could not quite hang in there for all the detail that was required to make the project work.
I hit this phenomena again recently. I was talking for more than four hours with someone I had never met before. In the course of that conversation I found out that they were deeply intelligent, well traveled, well read, and had some truly original and fascinating insights into some things : things I had thought about for years and never picked up on. Then another in the room mentioned the idea that they kept a laptop by their bed, for late night computing needs, and they got the oddest reaction. This person could not believe anyone would do such a thing as have a laptop near their bed. I keep two there : a Linux laptop, and an Apple laptop, so I thought nothing of it.
Somehow this crossed some line for this individual between intelligent and geeky and it is always an education to find where that line is. It is completely individual, just like we all are. I am sure when I quoted Babylon 5, geek alarms went off for some, and for others it was more like “Hey, I didn't know he liked Babylon 5 too”.
My next door neighbors have a sort of mixed marriage. He is an engineer and a homebody. She loves to travel and I am insanely jealous of all the places she has been. She has seen the Taj Mahal twice! They are in their 80's now, so clearly they have figured out how to make that work. They are both intelligent, creative people. He likes to create from his home, in the world of his mind. She likes to learn new things, meet new people, and is trying to see everything that can be seen. He walks the dog while she is away. What is clear is that part of staying young is staying interested in things.
Meeting the needs of the creator
My theory about why there are so many Open Source projects with so many people so good at such complicated and esoteric things as writing operating systems like Linux or FreeBSD or amazingly sophisticated graphical applications like GIMP (or, any of the other 21,000 projects in Debian alone) then is this:
This is their interest
This is their community
This is who values them for what they want to be valued for
I know when I used to talk to Rick Troth about things like “suloginv” or “CMSFS” or any of the other Open Source things he was working on while he was here, there was always a special note of affection in his voice. He truly loved that work and that community of people. It was not just that they valued and love Rick either. it was that they were in a position to better understand exactly what it was he was doing, how hard it was, what it's value would be... and they valued him for that which he wanted to be valued for. I used to get a warm glow just standing next to him.
There was an interesting article I read today about the number of contributors to the Linux kernel growing. For the purposes of this posts focus, it was especially interesting that the total number of people contributing code to the Linux kernel just since the 2.6.11 kernel came out has doubled. Change rate is doubled too: from two changes an hour to four. Per hour!
Moving back to a personal example: what about oneself does one wish to be liked for? Does it feel better to have someone say you look good today, or that they really liked that patch you checked into the repository, or that you really made a great play in the game... what about you is what you want to be appreciated for? I was very gratified when I started this weblog by the response to it. As personal an act as writing is (a virtual putting your heart out on your sleeve if you will) it would have been hard to have had a huge groundswell of "You Stink" kind of responses.
Swimming against the needs
Companies that do not get this are going to be in trouble. The power of the creative / innovative is stacked against them. They will be facing companies that do get it. Entire groups and communities. Literally millions of smart creative innovative people motivated by common interest and community.
This is not even really a we-versus-them scenario, as much as some would personalize and demonize. To utterly torture a metaphor: This is a drive your stake in the ground and resist change thing, only to find your stake is really a sand castle, and that thing moving at you is wave. Big or little, fast or slow, the wave will win.
I said it was going to be tortured. But I like the mental image of the wave slowly lapping at the sand castle and think it appropriate. If you have ever been to one of those build a sand castle competitions, and then gone by the beach the next week you see all that remains, you get the picture. Beach. Waves. Skin cancer. Ok. Fine. Moving on.
Coming back then to the Babylon 5 quote at the top of the column. People always serve themselves. Their needs must be met. Look at any company in crisis, and most of the people that are leaving first are the good ones. They are not rats abandoning the ship, they are talents whose needs are not being satisfied.
My Brother spent his life battling alcohol. In the recovery programs he attended they talked about the fact the he had to work on himself before he could help anyone else. A sort of self protecting self involvment that was required to make progress against the disease. They had a saying: "You have to work on yourself before you can work on anyone else.". It may seem odd to say it that way, but it was and is based in a very solid bit of understanding about the way we humans work. If one does not take care of ones self, one can not have enough resources, mentally, emotionally, whatever, to be there for anyone else.
Call it enlightened self interest, or whatever you want. Creative and innovative people need to create and innovate. It is part of who they are. This is true of any subject: not just creation of Open Source programs for those gifted with talents in the area of programming, but any artistic endevour. And those of like interests tend to form communities: Just take a trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico or Marfa, Texas or Jerome, Arizona. Three places that pop to my mind whenever I think of the term "Artist Colony". There are many others....
Writers must write. Coders must code. All are acts of creation. All creative needs must be satisfied.
It is the way we are. Oddly, few companies really understand this about their creative talent. Some may even actively work against it.
Many companies fight a delaying game. They throw up as many obstacles as they can to try and slow things down. See SCO for details on how that worked out.
Here is another example: MS is seeing a drop-off in third party apps for MS Windows. This report says 10%, with another 2% this year. I am sure it will be denied as being true though. What I will be curious to see is if Ray Ozzie "gets it". Signs are not good: the patent deals with vendors like Novell and Xandros and Linspire look like another delaying action to me.
People will met their own needs. They will ultimately serve themselves, and their creative desires. They will go to where they feel good about what they do. They have to. They are people. That is just how people work.
As for the second half of the B5 quote: They will trust those that think and feel and act the same way they do.
That would actually be a whole other post I think.[Egoless Programming|http://beta.openmanagement.org/blogs/stevecarl/2007/05/16/egoless-programming-an d-open-source]