Given enough typewriters and time, a group of monkeys will, theoretically, write the complete works of Shakespeare. A similar theory applies to one faction of real world software development - that of the open source community.
[VIDEO]Take almost a million developers, motivate them with tricky problems, the sense of community, and a decentralised system, and you will get working software. The fact that open source development works is testified through products like Linux.
Today I would like to look at how it works, and the impact this alternate paradigm will have on developing markets.
The principle of involving multiple sources for your development sounds great, but actually getting the masses to act as a single entity should be near impossible
Jason Norwood-Young, technology editor, ITWeb
One man whom I had the pleasure of interviewing lately, Eric Raymond, has written and talked extensively on the subject of open source development. Apart from being an open source developer and co-founder of the movement, he sees himself as an anthropologist studying a new breed of tribal culture growing among the hackers of the world.
His work on the subject revolves a great deal around his own open source project, Fetchmail, inspired by a desire to understand how Linus Torvalds could get developers from around the world working in a single direction for the creation of Linux, without the need for any management in its typical role.
In his paper "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", Raymond states 19 lessons learned by open source development. "Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging," states Raymond`s sixth message.
The most to lose
The involvement of users in the development process does exist in the closed source community, but the user is seen as a beta-tester, not as a co-developer. Open source passes much of the development responsibility to the people who wish to use the product - the people who have the most to lose from bugs and security holes.
The eighth lesson follows a similar tack: "Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterised quickly and the fix obvious to someone."
With enough users, someone will have the knowledge or tool-set to find and fix every bug in a program. Traditional development in a closed environment is unable to make use of these and the other open source lessons, as the user is not trusted with the sacred code. By doing this, closed development projects limit their customer involvement and their developer numbers.
The principle of involving multiple sources for your development sounds great, but actually getting the masses to act as a single entity should be near impossible in the anarchic, chaotic system that one imagines evolving from such a mix.
Strangely, this doesn`t occur. Leadership is formed and projects are driven from a single person or a select few lead developers. Participants in open source projects nominate their peers for this position not through a democratic process, but rather by choosing the project with a leader whom they can work under.
This structure flies in the face of traditional management hierarchies. Raymond states in an addition to his paper that conventional management has no place in the open source community. "Having a conventional management structure solely in order to motivate... is probably good tactics but bad strategy," says Raymond; "a short-term win, but in the longer term a surer loss." If this is true, then times are definitely changing for the software industry.
Leaked Halloween documents
Even Microsoft has acknowledged the potential that open source can deliver to the software market. The Halloween documents - seeing their second birthday this week - proved a great boon for the open source community when they were leaked from the software giant. The documents were leaked from Microsoft in October 1998 from anonymous sources, and contain the company`s threat-assessment of Linux and open source development, as well as Microsoft`s strategy to compete with open source.
"OSS poses a direct, short-term revenue and platform threat to Microsoft, particularly in the server space," notes the first Halloween document. "Additionally, the intrinsic parallelism and free idea exchange in OSS has benefits that are not replicable without our current licensing model and therefore present a long-term developer mind-share threat."
Microsoft should be worried. Open source advocates are actively promoting this model in developing countries - especially Africa - where the cost of Microsoft software is often too high for small and medium enterprise to consider it as a possibility. Open source or pirating are the only alternatives left open to them. Even SA, which is economically well off compared to our northern neighbours, boasts the 24th largest Linux community in the world. If Linux does become the operating system of choice for Africa, the skills could become as commonplace as Windows literacy, thus nullifying Microsoft`s strength by numbers.
Microsoft`s Halloween document states: "In the Far East, for example, Linux is reportedly growing faster than Internet connectivity - due primarily to educational adoption."
It is unlikely that closed software vendors will cease to exist in the near future, as Raymond predicts. What is certain - as it is already happening - is that open source will share the spoils with the traditional software vendors, and gain true respect from the business world, thus changing the face of IT forever.
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