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Users as Innovators - Why Open Source Works 251

Posted by timothy from the pave-your-path-where-the-grass-is-bent dept.
eaglemoon writes "Many people still have difficulty understanding why open source software projects are successfull. The Boston Globe has an interview with Eric von Hippel, a Professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, on users as innovators. In his new book, von Hippel, discusses how open source projects draw on the creativity of ''lead users," who are often ahead of the curve on technology and marketplace trends. Von Hippel shows the trend already is more advanced than is generally known, and users often freely reveal their innovations for the common good. The social efficiency of a system in which individual innovations are developed by individual users is increased if users somehow diffuse what they have developed to others.....he also notes that the transition to user-centered innovation is hard for some companies to swallow.
The online version of the book is available under a Creative Commons license."
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Users as Innovators - Why Open Source Works More

Users as Innovators - Why Open Source Works

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  • OSS discovers science. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    So in other words, Open Source discovers what scientists already knew.

    • Re:OSS discovers science. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Or perhaps it is re-proving what corporate influence is helping the scientific community to forget.

  • Open Source Presentation (Score:5, Informative)

    by siokaos ( 107110 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @08:28PM (#12277109) Homepage
    My writing class had an open topic presentation, and some friends of mine and I just did a presentation on the Business and Development elements of open source projects :)

    Check it out
    http://neuclid.com/OpenSourcePres.pdf

  • Problem (Score:5, Insightful)

    by elid ( 672471 ) <eli.ipod@g m a il.com> on Monday April 18, 2005 @08:29PM (#12277122)
    One major problem with open-source is the lack of artists willing to work under such a license. For an example ot what results, see the "new" FreeCIV.
    • excellent point!

      even the best of F/OSS games have only adequate, at best, graphics.

      the F/OSS world has a shortage of artists. why is this? maybe they have enough to do without contributing to open source projects? i'm not sure.

      • Re:Problem (Score:4, Insightful)

        by aCapitalist ( 552761 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @09:15PM (#12277517)
        The reason is that artists don't have a culture of sharing like coders do (way before FSF or GNU), because that model doesn't really work with art - at least traditional art for obvious reasons.

        • No, it's because artists don't care. Compound with this the fact that modern society rewards less than 1% of all artists and you have a population of starving artists that just don't want to work for free in the name of the greater good.

          • Re:Problem (Score:2, Insightful)

            by aCapitalist ( 552761 )
            Compound with this the fact that modern society rewards less than 1% of all artists and you have a population of starving artists

            Are graphic designers starving artists? Are game world/model/texture artists starving?

            The development of those above mediums tends to be a much individualistic process than code. Now whether that is just cultural/traditional or otherwise is another story, but that's just the way it seems to be.

            As far as "modern society rewarding less than 1% of all artists"...if the other 99
        • I think you're so fundamentally right that us, programmers, need to revolutionise "artwork". We've already done this with scalable vector graphics. It's common for people to take SVG icon sets that they like and extend them, or copy bits from one icon to make a new one. You try to do the same thing with bitmaps and you quickly discover how limiting it is. I think the same thing goes for 3d graphics. We need to drop this artist-tweaks-the-vertexs-till-it's-right mentality and start coding our "art".

          • hahahahahahahahaha....

            let me know how that turns out.

            (Coming from a video game graphics coder)
            • Well have a look at all the graphics in 2nd life.. everything there is built from primitives, except for the player characters, which are algorithmically generated. It is doable, I've just never seen much of it in open source.

        • Re:Problem (Score:5, Interesting)

          by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @11:53PM (#12278549) Homepage Journal
          "The reason is that artists don't have a culture of sharing like coders do (way before FSF or GNU), because that model doesn't really work with art - at least traditional art for obvious reasons."

          You'd be surprised. Head on over to www.scifi-meshes.com. There are models of a bunch of starships there that anybody can download. Then you can post your artwork with those models. It's been around for years.

          You've got a point that traditional artwork isn't so easy to share. However, communities can share in more ways than one. Technique is just as valuable as sharing code. At least with the communities I hang out with, most people are quite happy to share how they achieved a certain effect. Quite a few even take the time to post how-to's.

          I realize we're not talking about precisely the same thing here, but I hope you get my point. Quite a bit of time is spent between artists helping each other out.
          • Coding is almost a commodity; many people can do it...it's mostly about logic and coherence. Art requires an aesthetic talent; few people have it. So it's natural that artists will not share their work; it's much more precious.

            Another difference between code and art is that code are tools to be used by others. Art is not a tool, art is a medium that can pass around messages, and therefore is much more powerful than code.

          • The art world is so much famine with occassional blips of feast, that it's hard for starving artists to feel good about one of their own that strikes it big, particularly if the one striking it big is not regarded as a particularly talented artist among professionals (Thomas Kinkade - who is a certainly a good artist - but arguably not a great artist), or if they happen to get lucky applying a technique that was pioneered by someone else.

            Some great artists never get recognized while they're alive.

            Artists

      • the F/OSS world has a shortage of artists. why is this?

        My guess is that it's because artists like to eat, and it's a hell of a lot harder to make a living as an artist than a tech-head. Not a whole lot of time left over to wank off to Natalie Portman pics.

        Max

    • Re:Problem (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Short Circuit ( 52384 ) *
      Positive example: OpenQuartz [sourceforge.net]. They made a Free replacement for Quake I's content.

    • Re:Problem (Score:4, Insightful)

      by bersl2 ( 689221 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @11:05PM (#12278319) Journal
      This needs to be modded up higher.

      In general, artists fear that someone will claim their work as their own, so they tend to be very anal about their babies: often, they ask that you not redistribute or alter their images, which kind of goes against the whole idea of free culture. (Trivia: the Berne Convention happened essentially at Victor Hugo's insistence. Case in point.)

      We must mollify their fears if we are to largely gain them as an ally. We must show them that they will be no worse off using the principles of free culture than they are now, if they are willing to accept some change.

      I cannot stress the importentce they play.

      • Re:Problem (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Benny2891 ( 877189 ) <info AT arthacking DOT org> on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @02:22AM (#12279170) Homepage
        There are artists out there who do embrace the FOSS method in the production of their work. They just don't make graphics for video games. (As far as I know). There is a population of contemporary "fine" artists (I really hate that term) who are attempting to do this. You are not going to see there work in conventional venues that often however. Simon Yuill and Chad McCail are working on such a project [http://www.spring-alpha.org]. [http://www.agile-process.com/] and [http://www.machinista.org/] are other examples of artists looking at this. There are others, I just mentioned these to make a point. In a lot of ways, artists and programmers operate in similar ways.
        Actually, I am one of them. I recently started a PhD candidacy on this very topic. While my research is still very much in the early stages, I am beginning to realise that in order for the FOSS way of doing things to be more widely adapted, the methodologies need to be reworked. I don't think that actually economics are the determining factor here. Very few of the artists I know (and I know a lot) make much money from the direct production of there artwork. They need to supplement their income either by doing something like teaching or constantly chasing down grants, endowments and the like. It wouldn't be too hard to make the argument that "opening" your practise would actually help you secure more of this type of income. For the most part, Creative Commons [www.creativecommons.org] is sorting out the availability of licenses that are appropriate for artwork, so thats not that big of a deal. I think the biggest reason that artists are reluctant to embrace this kind of working is that we are still too hung up on the "original". It is deeply ingrained in the collective culture of the the arts. Originality of the idea and the art object itself is of the highest value when artists are assessing art. The FOSS way of doing things is perceived as encouraging copying and unoriginality. This is a big no-no for your average contemporary artist. If artists were just to look their history, they would realise that this obsession with the original is a relatively new thing, and that all creative works are built on top of the creative output that has already happened.
        While all that i just mentioned is within the framework of art as in Tate Modern / Guggenheim kind of art, the artists that do more commercial work most likely went through some sort of art education that the "fine" artists went to. They all more or less leaned the same values, and regard their work in a similar way.I think it will be a while before you see this happening more commonly in areas like Graphic Design and CG stuff.
        • The FOSS way of doing things is perceived as encouraging copying and unoriginality.

          Especially ironic since the original article is one of many instances where the FOSS types are trying to lay claim to the title of Supreme Innovators. "If we say it often enough, it MUST be true."

    • Re:Problem (Score:5, Interesting)

      by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @11:47PM (#12278520) Homepage Journal
      "One major problem with open-source is the lack of artists willing to work under such a license. For an example ot what results, see the "new" FreeCIV."

      I see your point, but I'm not sure the problem is the licensing. I think it's the lack of incentive.

      To get a job as an artist, you have to do some stand-out work and/or have project experience. Sadly, this creates a nasty problem: How does one get a job as an artist if they haven't had a job as an artist? The answer? Do some cool stuff on your own. Many artists do this. (Check out www.cgtalk.com to see what I mean.) However, it can be difficult for a self-starter to complete some ambitious work. I know I had that problem. If I couldn't get something done in an evening, I wouldn't do it. So what'd I do? Simple: I took on some pro-bono work.

      I did some artwork [nanogator.com] for a game called Ferion. (Now some of you will understand why it's in my sig.) There was no paycheck. Instead, the agreement was that I'd do the work provided I could take the time I needed to expand on my artform. The result? The work I did for Ferion almost single-handedly got me my dream job. There's absolutely no way I would have produced anything like that without somebody needing me to do it. I'm too lazy.

      So, how's this relate to OSS? I think really all it needs is the right presentation. There are LOTS of people who want to make artwork for a living. So long as they know that they're gaining valuable experience, you'll be able to find people willing to get the job done. If the project can offer some visibility, even better!
      • In other words, you got paid for your work. No, you didn't get any money, you got paid in experience, and the opportunity to produce something that you can show to other people.

        I can definitely see that as a viable model for aspiring artists, but I'm not sure how many established artists you'll manage to attract. Of course there will always be some that will do it for fun; with luck, that'll be enough, because Fate knows there appear to be precious few willing to do it at the moment.

        I don't think it's a p
    • ...A clone of something slightly better, 10 years too late?

    • I think that the problem more has to do with the fact that programmers don't tend to have people with graphical skills in their environment.

      My father can draw (as in oil painting, water painting, etching, sketching, ink art, etc).

      After he is finished doing the electricity for my brother's house, I will go with him over techniques to produce icons, because I would like him help to create a new set of icons for WebMin, which the Webmin people would then get.

  • Another reason might be... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Sprotch ( 832431 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @08:30PM (#12277129)
    That Open Source is successful in markets abandonned by other companies. Firefox took over where IE 3.0 had left. Open Office might be doing something similar. Users will only be milked for so long...
    • and yet another reason may be what is "missing" in the open source world, namely the marketing/corporate layer that usually sits between the users and the developers. Think about all the fluff that's between these 2 groups in most large software companies. Without direct interaction much of the potentially valuable communication gets lost or, at best, watered down.

      • Yeah, I'm sure it really helps the average user to be called a fscking n00b and to go RTFM before bothering the developers with their dumb questions.

        Developers like to develop, not to support, and most have atrocious people skills. They are not necessarily good support people and relying on them for support is silly.

    • Considering IE 4/5 were far superior web browsers to the existing Netscape 4.x web browser suite, I would say it's fair to say the Firefox has started to innovate from where IE 6 left off.

      In regards to Open Office, yes it's free both as in beer and speech, however in terms of quality IMO it is not yet a patch on Microsoft Office by any means.

  • Scratching an itch (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18, 2005 @08:32PM (#12277146)
    Linux came about and developed because a bunch of people needed it for 'something'. It wasn't easily available so they developed it themselves. The trick was for Linus to provide a starting point and then not get in the way too badly.

    Half the secret of encouraging innovation is just to stay out of the way. That's a lot easier with open source than with proprietary products.

    • Scratching an itch-Bleed a victum. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "Half the secret of encouraging innovation is just to stay out of the way. That's a lot easier with open source than with proprietary products."

      The other half is telling them "write it yourself" when they complain about the software. That too is easier with open source, compared to proprietary products.
  • ...but the article seems to be comparing user feedback with open source, which are two different things. Just because the end user is saying what could be improved doesn't mean it is open source.
    • I think there's more honest feedback in open source-land. Firstly, people generally get an email address of an actual developer (how many Outlook programmers addresses do you have?).

      The users and the programmers both feel part of a community rather thatn the screwer and the screwee.People will give honest feedback when they feel part of the action.

      IMHO, one big defect in the GPL is that it does not protect the rights of the testers and others who put in the hard yards to change a bunch of lines of code in

      • one big defect in the GPL is that it does not protect the rights of the testers and others who put in the hard yards to change a bunch of lines of code into real useful software

        What rights do you believe are being infringed upon?

  • the user's perspective (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kebes ( 861706 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @08:36PM (#12277183) Journal
    Users will have a perspective on products that the programmer never will--namely the perspective of someone who *doesn't understand* how the application works! After designing and/or programming a piece of software for a long time, you can get to know it so well that every aspect of it seems obvious. Yet to a fresh user, who has no clue what is going on behind the scenes, your choice of layout may seem confusing. It has been said (many times) before, but programmers/designers need to *listen* to what users are saying. If something is hard to use, then it should be fixed! And yes, the users of a product will have tons of useful ideas for how to make a product better.

    Programmers know too much about the inner workings of a system... and thus they will immediately think of all the reasons why an innovative idea (interface element or feature) won't work. But the naive user, not encumbered by such restrictive thinking, may propose powerful features and novel interaction schemes. Some of these won't work, and some really are too hard to code, but there are many gems.
    • That's true sometimes.

      Most of the time though, users don't have the FOGGIEST idea of what they want. They know what they want to accomplish in the abstract sense, but they really don't know how to get there.

      I agree with you in one regard though, programmers are terrible at designing user interfaces. That's why at most moderate-sized companies there is a seperate position for UI designers. They generally also double as QA.

      To be honest, in the time I did commercial shrinkwrap, I rarely found users' direct
      • Most of the time though, users don't have the FOGGIEST idea of what they want.

        It isn't just "users", it is people in all roles, in general. Two simple examples come to mind, both of non-computer-related situations in which I have heard professionals complain that their customers or clients rarely have any idea whatsoever about what they want when they walk through the door, cash in hand:

        1. Custom homebuilding. I am building a new, 100% custom home. It is an extremely time-consuming and complex process. M
    • The most fun example of this in my experience is when I make a request for a feature or modification to the functionality of a program, and the programming staff (who, naturally, aren't the ones who are using the tools they produce day in and day out) dismiss the request without much discussion by claiming, in essence, that they know what's best and the users don't know what they want. It's not uncommon for this to take the form of them responding to a complaint about some aspect of the software that every
    • Users will have a perspective on products that the programmer never will--namely the perspective of someone who *doesn't understand* how the application works!
      What are you talking about I know plenty of developers who don't understand how the application works!
    • Programmers know too much about the inner workings of a system... and thus they will immediately think of all the reasons why an innovative idea (interface element or feature) won't work. But the naive user, not encumbered by such restrictive thinking, may propose powerful features and novel interaction schemes. Some of these won't work, and some really are too hard to code, but there are many gems.

      As a programmer, this is something I try really hard to do -- step back, and forget everything I know about

    • Re:the user's perspective (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Cyno ( 85911 )
      Programmers know too much about the inner workings of a system...

      And end users know too little. The problem with most commercial software is it looks like it was designed by the end users without much programmer innovation.

      Programmers innovate everything. They create code that wasn't there before they wrote it. I would trust them to innovate a more creative solution to most problems including user interface than the typical user would understand.

      • Inputs from a variety of people are going to lead - on average - to a more creative solution than a solution devised by a single person. Of course, there are genius programmers, just as there are genius users. But, they aren't the norm.

        Although, I would agree with you if I had to select one or another, I'd probably leave it to the programer to solve the problem. But this isn't an OR situation. It is an AND where users work together with programers. It is also a situation where there may not be a defined p

    • Forgive me if I am wrong, but with Free Software can't a user put an ad out for a programmer to implement the feature they want? So what if the original programmer tells them to write it themselves, they don't have to, they can pay someone to do it for them. Contrast with non-Free Software.

      If you do this right, when you are done you and possibly the community own this innovation. Contrast with non-Free Software.

      all the best,

      drew
  • I think this may have to do with companies' "top-down" corporate education. They believe they're "the best", they spend MILLIONS on hiring "the best". They spend millions on maintaining this structure, hiring even more people, buying the competition (*cough* Microsoft *cough*), etc etc.

    What can a simple user teach them? What can one single guy do? He's got no budget, doesn't have the resources to get "the best of the best", and can't possibly manage dealing with copyright issues. 'You think a bunch of hobbyists can do better than us?'

    Bottom-up, gentlemen, bottom-up.

    • Re:Bottom-up innovation (Score:5, Interesting)

      by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @09:03PM (#12277426) Homepage
      They believe they're "the best", they spend MILLIONS on hiring "the best".

      I know you put "the best" in quotes for a reason, but it's worth pointing out that corporations in no way get "the best" for their money.

      Generally speaking, corporations are stuck in the illusion that if something costs more, it must be better. An employee that was making 105k as an Active X programmer must be better than the QNX programmer making 85k, so let's hire the 105k programmer and pay him 125k. If a fast-talking guy can come in and say all of the right things, the heads will believe that this guy is the perfect person to be lead programmer, even though he just sold you on the idea of doing your 1,000 concurrent user database app in Access. Corporations are great at throwing money at getting great salesmen, but they're not always so good at getting good leaders, programmers, designers, etc.

      • Re:Bottom-up innovation (Score:5, Interesting)

        by QuantumG ( 50515 ) <qg@biodome.org> on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @12:01AM (#12278584) Homepage Journal
        You do know there are technology companies out there that let the engineers hire people themselves? When I was at VMWare an interview took all day. The recruit would be taken around to every engineer in the company and asked to help out with whatever the engineer was working on. The engineer would form an opinion of the person and their abilities and then send them on to the next engineer. This worked especially well because, at the time, every engineer at VMWare had their own office, or shared with 1 or 2 other engineers, but there were no cubicals. At the end of the day the recruit was sent away and the team leaders asked everyone what they thought of the recruit. If there was an overall good feeling the recruit got hired.
        • We don't go that far, but all interviews where I work are conducted by the interviewee's prospective peers. That is, designers are interviewed by designers, programmers by programmers, etc.

          The only time HR gets involved is in signing off permission to hire, and sorting out the contract, etc. Once we have the permission, we handle *everything* ourselves (including filtering of CVs, etc). I (a senior programmer) have personally said "yes" or "no" regarding prospective hires. (Although we tend to interview in
    • Like that time the car company decided to build a line of automobiles designed by Homer J. Simpson. Yeah, that worked.

  • Just remember (Score:5, Insightful)

    by YrWrstNtmr ( 564987 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @08:36PM (#12277188)
    open source projects draw on the creativity of "lead users," who are often ahead of the curve on technology and marketplace trends.

    Some of those curves and trends lead to dead ends. Valid dead ends.

    Don't get discouraged when they do, know when to kill it, and move on in a different direction. But do move on.

  • Polish (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mr. marbles ( 19251 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @08:40PM (#12277226)
    My question is even though Open Source can create massive amounts of ground work, why is it still generally incapable of shipping fully polished products? Take a look at the Mac, they went the extra mile, they took all the innovation of the open source world and did all the work hobbiest don't do. What does open source need to make linux or something else fully polished? What makes open source projects like Firefox beat the curse?

    • Re:Polish (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jehreg ( 120485 )
      Structured QC/QA team. That's what makes or breaks a FOSS project.

    • Re:Polish (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jayloden ( 806185 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @09:15PM (#12277518)
      I often think about this very topic...if someone or someones would come along and put the pedal to the medal on polishing those things off, Linux would become one hell of a competitor.

      I think it comes down to the hacker mindset, where the interesting problem is king. No one wants to work on the "boring" tasks like cleaning up GUI buttons and interface text. They'd rather work out exotic new gut level kernel code or rough out the next great feature. We're always questing for the next feature and getting it sketched into the system, and never quite get around to inking everything in. I think eventually, this will happen, at least to some degree. In some places it IS happening, but it's going to take time.

      -Jay

      • Redhat should have done that before Apple.. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by xtal ( 49134 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @01:18AM (#12278944)

        I often think about this very topic...if someone or someones would come along and put the pedal to the medal on polishing those things off, Linux would become one hell of a competitor.

        Redhat had enough money to do what apple did for BSD.. In a way, apple is the perfect company to put that polish on - it's what they do. I'm not sure there's a place anymore for a polished desktop UNIX the way there was a place for it in, say, 1997.

        It certainly is what Linux needs to smash onto the x86 desktop. People seem to get too caught up on Holy Wars (tm) to make this one happen though. Maybe I'm wrong - but I'm writing this on a powerbook, too, and in 1997 I was one of those point-and-laugh at mac types.

      • Well, off you go!

    • The nature of the developers (Score:5, Interesting)

      by hellfire ( 86129 ) <deviladv AT gmail DOT com> on Monday April 18, 2005 @09:17PM (#12277540) Homepage
      It's not limited to linux. I've seen several Mac and Windows programs that don't appear to have a lot of polish. Hell, my own company, who happens to have the largest market share of software sales within its niche isn't nearly as polished as some competitors.

      So many developers are either simply not experienced in proper structure, or proper GUI design, or they are under pressure by execs or marketing departments to get the project out the door. The important part of the software is does it do what it's supposed to do? Yes? Then ship it.

      The type of polish tends to differ. There are plenty of windows and mac apps with bad GUI, but it happens more in the Linux community because the body of developers don't have a deep background in coding GUI interfaces as to Mac or Windows developers. Windows programs tend to have more bugs but the windows environment provides a stable interface usually. Mac apps probably have the best of both worlds (as long as you agree the OS X interface is as good as the OS 9 interface).

    • Re:Polish (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Bastian ( 66383 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @09:36PM (#12277710)
      The same thing that allows the OSS community to produce so much ground work so efficiently is what keeps many (most?) projects from becoming particularly polished. The great majority of OSS programmers like to just sit down and hack stuff out, and aren't particularly interested in the overhead and extra effort involved in maintaining a high degree of internal coordination and consistency. Plus, since most OSS developers are working on a volunteer basis, you can't really force anyone to conform to anyone else's standards.

      I haven't been a member of the OSS community for very long - about a decade - but I get the impression that this is largely a fairly recent cultural development that coincides rather closely with the rise of Linux. If you look further back at older projects such as BSD Unix and XFree86, you may notice that there isn't nearly as much of this explosion of forks and competing projects. BSD only has five OSS offspring that I can think of - Free, Open, Net, Darwin, and Dragonfly. Of these, all have very different goals - FreeBSD is aimed at being a high performance Unix for commodity hardware. OpenBSD is designed to be rock-solid secure and stable. NetBSD is insanely portable. Darwin has its own kernel and is largely a move by Apple to get OSS help in developing its own operating system, and Dragonfly is aimed at scalability.

      Compare this with the Linux community, where there are oodles of different distributions - many with only minor differences in architecture or philosophy - in a constant state of flux. Many of the Linux distributions that I have used as my primary OS over the years have all but disappeared (Yggdrasil), and many others appear to be in a state of rapid decline (Slackware).

      Again, this is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, this culture leads to a tremendous amount of exploration and innovation - consider the plethora of package management philosophies you have to choose from in the linux world, or the huge pile of GUI toolkits available to software developers. On the other hand, this leads to a whole mess of duplicated (some would say wasted) effort - consider how many different packages of the same program many software projects have to maintain and how most major distributions roll their own packages of all the most popular software, or how you may find yourself installing several UI libraries (all of which, you must admit, mostly do the exact same thing) in order to use all the applications you want.

      The projects that escape this - Mozilla, the Linux kernel, Mono, etc. - mostly do so because they get a lot of corporate backing, which provides a lot of paid developers and business discipline which can exert a degree of control over the swarm of amateur and hobbyist programmers who are constantly coming and going.
      • All the BSDs are operating systems. Linux is just a kernel. The reason why there are a large number of "linux distributions" is because you can do a heck of a lot with a kernel.

        • Re:Polish (Score:3, Informative)

          by Bastian ( 66383 )
          Linux may be a kernel, but linux distributions are operating systems.

          It turns out that all the BSD babies have kernels as well.

          Linux distributions can all run pretty much the same software, and in many ways all the major linux distros are far more similar to each other than the various BSDs are to each other.

          I think what I'm trying to say is, I really have no idea what you're trying to get at, here.

      • If you look further back at older projects such as BSD Unix and XFree86, you may notice that there isn't nearly as much of this explosion of forks and competing projects. BSD only has five OSS offspring that I can think of - Free, Open, Net, Darwin, and Dragonfly.

        BSDI, SunOS, 386BSD, dozens of others. Though I'm guessing you're only counting BSD offspring that are still "alive".

        Compare this with the Linux community, where there are oodles of different distributions - many with only minor differenc

    • Re:Polish (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Peter La Casse ( 3992 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @09:59PM (#12277896)

      I think it's a matter of the "90/90" rule; the first 90% is the fun part, and the second 90% is the not fun part.

      • Re:Polish (Score:3, Informative)

        by daVinci1980 ( 73174 )
        Mod parent up. This is *exactly* the reason.

        The first 90% is all of the fun stuff. Database access, rendering engines, networking layers...

        The last 90% is all of the unsexy stuff. UI layout, tweaking and bugfixing. Pesky user complaints. That one case that violates the rule. Then the other case that violates the rule. Then ...

        • Dead right, except when it comes to games - amusingly so given your .sig :) - it's more like 20% is the fun stuff and the other 120% is grind: resource management, user interfaces, reusable frameworks, in-house replacements for standard library functions that don't quite cut it, gameplay polish and so on.

          Having looked at a couple of commercial game engines in detail, I reckon maybe only 10% is the fun stuff - the rest is the necessary admin.
    • In a normal world the software that is well designed, would also be a very pretty and asthetic too. But we don't live in a normal world, we live in a world where people try to controll information and try to force "ownership" like it is physical property.

      In this kind of world, it is in financial best interest of proprietary software companies to expeidate what looks good at the expense of what is good - wether it be good as in engineering, design, security, or good as in just plain ole freedom (eg the fre

    • The 80-20 rule (Score:4, Insightful)

      by syousef ( 465911 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @12:35AM (#12278762) Journal
      Basically it's boring and expensive and hard work to polish a product.

      If something is open source it's usually also free as in beer. It may take a hell of a lot of work to get it to the point where it's a good open source product. Unfortunately that last 20% of the work to polish it off takes 80% of the effort. Most of the time by the time you have a good product there's no one left willing to pay for it to be polished off. The developers themselves also lose interest: After all they could be making a small fortune doing something similar elsewhere, but they do it under the open source model for a variety of reasons - obviously they're usually more motivated by interest than money.

  • Lead Users (Score:5, Funny)

    by pyrrhonist ( 701154 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @08:43PM (#12277251)
    In his new book, von Hippel, discusses how open source projects draw on the creativity of "lead users," who are often ahead of the curve on technology and marketplace trends.

    I'm made of copper, you insensitive clod!

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @08:44PM (#12277262)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • There are a lot of academic projects that vanish when the students graduate, or the professors lose funding (or fail to make tenure). Some of them end up as OpenSource. If you read academic research in computer science/engineering, you'll see it is 5 to 30+ years ahead of mainstream commercial development. Add in a nationwide distaste for All Things Educated, and it becomes clear why FOSS is years ahead of commercial stuff.
  • Microsoft has helped the Open source revolution happen.

    Look at the UI. Look at the applications. The basic look and feel hasn't changed significantly since 1995. Almost every new technology "innovation" has been either bought or copied (poorly) by Microsoft.

    OSS' growth has been more viral, more grassroots, more innovative than the top-down "we know better than you" approach that Microsoft has successfully imposed on its users in the last 5 years. It is with this suppression of innovation that Microsof

  • I guess I missed the "Open Source" part (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Liquidrage ( 640463 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @09:01PM (#12277414)
    I RTFA, but I did not RTFB.

    The article doesn't appear to anything more then talk of user feedback. Which really isn't open or closed source specific.

    For example FTFA:
    Boeing Co., for example, solicits feedback from its airline customers on new jumbo jet configurations and is heavily involved with its machine tool suppliers on the design of new production equipment. ''What you see is economic activity shifting to the side of use," von Hippel said.

    The medical example is similar. Passengers aren't using Boeing's Open Source Jet to modify their own. Instead, Boeing is *gasp* taking into account passenger feedback. Likewise, suppliers for Boeing are, *gasp*, listening to Boeing.

    The one part that gets into the area at least is:
    "The social efficiency of a system in which individual innovations are developed by individual users is increased if users somehow diffuse what they have developed to others,"

    Which I agree with. But the examples given weren't up that alley. Furthermore, I think a vast majority of organizations leverage software that is open source because it's free, not because they care for the source. I know we have pieces of OSS no one is *allowed* to touch. Ever. We didn't get it to modify, we got it because it worked. If we had to modify it we would'nt have used it. Of course, not everyone is in this situation. And not all OSS I have is like that. And that does leave us the choice, which is good even if now we don't touch it. But I think a vast majority of developer OSS use is Free Software they won't ever touch. I think the true use of the Source in Open Source is the exception, not the norm.

    The book might be more "Open Sourcey". I'll wait for the movie.

  • Many people still have difficulty understanding why open source software projects are successfull.

    And I have difficulties to understand why people with such difficulties ask themselves such questions?

    Come on. Everybody likes to stay in the light and say: look what have I done!

    Regarding successfull open source projects: they are not really commercial successful, but merely successfull software project.

    One reason why they are successfull is: now they can be done. 20 years ago they could not be done.

    No
  • The interview had nothing to do with open source.

    Proprietary software companies have been using usability studies, feedback systems, beta testers for a long time.

    Does anybody remember the whole Gnome/Eugenia/end-user flap? Or how about the bounty system that was rejected by KDE developers?

    There must be a big myth that open source end-users have more influence with open source projects. In fact, if they don't code they probably have less influence than with proprietary products because there is less of

    • Re:What does "lead users" have to do with open sou (Score:5, Insightful)

      by benjamindees ( 441808 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @09:39PM (#12277746) Homepage
      There must be a big myth that open source end-users have more influence with open source projects.

      There's more money in OSS than you think. Of course proprietary developers listen to their customers too, but to a lesser extent. The difference is, OSS providers can't hide behind lock-in file formats, obtrusive licenses, and established monopolies if they want to make money. They have to earn it, by listening to users and providing for their needs.

      And it's not as easy as a "usability study" would have you believe. It means living with users day in and day out and dealing with all of their problems, not just watching them click a few buttons for a couple of hours and optimizing the menus. A vast majority of the proprietary crap software wouldn't exist if all programmers were forced to then support it from the "hell desk". Fortunately for OSS, many developers *are* supporting end users directly, and code accordingly.
    • I'm a kde developer, and want to reply regarding the bounty system..

      It was rejected because the developers weren't convinced it would have a positive impact, and pointed out there is no reason why the bounty system couldn't be implemented outside of KDE. Anyone could setup a website for a bounty system for kde apps. But the kde developers themselves did not feel the hassle and difficulty in trying to such a system working was worthwhile. (And there's a lot of subtleties involved. Imagine one user does
  • Suppose microsoft for example maintains tight control of their development environment for windows, they can fall victim of their own success and soon, the OS is so bloated and buggy, no one can maintain it and eventually, you have the soggy mess that is XP. I don't know how many developers maintain it, but it might be only in the thousands.

    Linux for example is fully open source and no one has the remotest monopoly on it. Anyone can add/edit/modify as they see fit, although a select group of individuals ma
    • hmm, didn't they pretty much replace single edged swords?:-)

      there would be no special advantage of one company v.s. another to make an office suite that runs on it and the one that is truly less buggy and more feature rich and more secure is the one that ultimately wins.

      But that isn't how has to work, instead corps that use the software hire programmers to work on the software to keep making it better. Since the corp's business model is in using the software not in making the sofware, it's in the corp's
      • That's a very good point I hadn't considered.

        Is there a size-of-company point at which this no longer holds? I doubt small sized companies would be capable or willing to hire a programmer to do something like that and rather simply use the product as it is - that is if the software is GPL or something.

        I was referring more to the microsofts of the world whose software developed IS their product, not the tools used allowing them to make their product. I may be out to lunch, but I would say that once most co
    • I disagree with you here. I have a problem with closed source since unless I implicitly trust the supplier I'm never quite certain what the software is doing. For that reason I very much favor open source over closed source, even though I myself sometimes use closed source software (e.g. Opera).

      However, I very much disagree with the 'free software uber alles' folks. I do not think everything has to be GPL'd or dumped into the public domain. I'm firmly with the copyright holder and think the unwashed ma

  • Eric von Hippel's course at MIT (Score:5, Interesting)

    by patiwat ( 126496 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @09:10PM (#12277476)
    Eric is a great teacher - I took a graduate course with him on Innovation Management (15.356) a few years ago. The course was recently renamed "How to Develop Breakthrough Products and Services" and is available via MIT's OpenCourseWare at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Sloan-School-of-Manageme nt/15-356Spring2004/CourseHome/index.htm [mit.edu]. The course home page also gives a very brief overview of Eric's lead user concept. It's one of his pet ideas, and although it isn't the sole focus on the course, it certainly is one of the foundations.

    The actual class was wonderful: a mix of working scientists and R&D executives, Sloanies and other MIT grad students, and a couple of undergrads sitting in. Lots of student interaction and learning from your peers. The individual project was a good experience as well - I wrote a paper analyzing why Lockheed's X-33 space plane project failed, and what could have been done so that the the technologies developed (autonomous navigation and landing, composite materials, linear aerospike engines, metallic thermal protection system) didn't die with the project. Eric gave lots of guidance and advise on the analysis.

  • Users Aren't Programmers (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    And thus it's not generally possible for "individual innovations" to be "developed by individual users". Users may know what they want, but they have to translate their ideas through a programming team, and so the end user doesn't recally care if the source is open or not. They'll never see it.

    The one area where this statement is not true is where programmers happen to be the target audience -- that it, compilers, editors, operatings systems, and so on, plus some ancillary tools that programmers also fin
  • Open source software is made by a bunch of people who actually want to do the work. Some of it turns out to be good. Perhaps it is not obvious to management types that people can do good work without threat of punishment.
  • Major corporations not "normal" people. Mozilla was pushed by AOL/Netscape. Open Office Sun. Linux has Red Hat, IBM, and many more. Frankly I worry more about the "grass roots" nature of OSS disappearing. As it gains popularity the ratio of leeches to developers gets smaller and smaller. Just look at the number of people that do nothing but complain about this OSS project lacks this or that feature vs people that say "this is cool and if I add this feature it will be even cooler".
    For the fast amount of peop

  • Users as innovators (Score:3, Insightful)

    by _ph1ux_ ( 216706 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @10:20PM (#12278038)
    Of course users are innovators. There is no better person to tell you what would be better in an application or interface than people who use the software day-in and day-out.

    I am not talking about your average users though, like Grandma etc..

    I mean power users. For example, I am an expert at AutoCAD as I have been using it since its inception, and other CAD programs before that. By the time I was in highschool I was teaching other students how to use AutoCAD version 9.

    I have made many suggestions to autodesk based on my useage of their app. While I think its incredibly powerful, its only now begining to incorporate some useability "wishlist" items that have been desired for many many years.

    I will concede however, that many of these features require the maturity of the application and the savviness of the developers to reach a certain level before being implementable. I also feel that hardware needed to be there - such as good video cards.

    Finally, I also feel that we just have not "gotten it" yet with just about every interface. I have yet to use some interface that is entirely smooth and "intuitive" (functioning as I would desire it to function in a manner that feels entirely natural). This is a pretty obvious statement though, and I know that many applications have their shining points.

    As an example, there are aspects of AutoCAD that just kick ass over any other application ever used (by me) - and there are aspects of Softimage and Maya as well that are stunningly fluid, while others are exceedingly obtuse.

    If I were an application developer who was worth his salt, I would be seeking the most active users of my applications and solicite their feedback to a much greater degree than simply 'Focus Groups'...

    Hopefully, I am preaching to the choir.

    -phlux

  • I found the most interesting part of this article to be the idea of companies using toolkits to sow & gather innovation, deploying innovation-enabling toolkits and then drawing the resulting innovation back to you.

    Interesting because that's a method we're trying to develop here at BRINQ for use in the Base of the Pyramid [brinq.com], the designation for 4+ billion of the so-called "poor" living in the base of the global economic pyramid.

    The heart of our work is the belief that different cultures, diff

  • that this professor is just one dyslexic capitalist away from being dubbed "Von Hippie".
  • My company uses users in exactly this way - each of the develoment teams in our area has a business person working with them. They might well be doing other things as well, but the important thing is that when we have questions about how something should work, they're sitting there at the desk able to help, provide ideas, etc. It works amazingly well.

    For more info on it, see here [livejournal.com]

  • Incentives (Score:3, Insightful)

    by zotz ( 3951 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2005 @08:15AM (#12280576) Homepage Journal
    One thought to ponder:

    The old way:

    Company owns product. Product lacks features. User suggests feature to implement. Company implements. Company owns users innovation and sells it to the user.

    The new way:

    Community owns product. Community member implements feature or suggests feature to implement and community implements feature. Community owns innovation and members benefit from it.

    That is in very simplified terms. But do you see how the old way might lack some incentive for a user to give his innovative ideas to the company only to have them own them and sell them back to him?

    all the best,

    drew

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